The search begins…

I’ve been a user of Mac for a while, and with the dashboard, there are some really nifty widgets. One in specific is a program called Sol. It tells you the sunrise, sunset and twilight times and has a little graphic. I love it!

I’ve found that most of these widgets are basic html or java files that do their own calculations…just like Windows Vista gadgets.

What I’m looking for, is a way to convert the program from a mac widget, to a sidebar gadget, or find a program that works similar. The original owner has provided the source code on his website, and if I were to convert it, I would definitely reference his work as the original.

If anyone knows how to decompile this stuff and convert it to work as a gadget, please let me know!

Awesome series….

Considering that the NASA LRO/LCROSS has been slungshot around the moon for yet another moon mission, I’ve decided to watch one of my old HBO series…From the Earth to the Moon.

It is Directed by Michael Grossman, with Tom Hanks as a narrator.

This series tells the story of the NASA moon program. From the first spaceflight by Alan Shephard in the Mercury program, to the final man on the moon, Eugene Cernan, during Apollo 17.

If you are interested in spaceflight, SciFi, or the upcoming moon missions of the next decade, you should give it consideration. It’s a wonderful series, and tells a lot of the backstory, issues, problems, and resolutions to many of the missions.

Career Fairs FTW!

Well…tomorrow is going to be a busy day. There is a military recruitment fair in the city, and it seems that there are a TON of folks that are going to be there. I’ll be getting my stuff ready (suit/tie, resume, 30-second commercial, etc.) and hopefully I’ll be able to walk away grinning from ear to ear.

I also have a tour of the local Exxon/Mobile plant along with a possible interview later in the day. This plant seemed interested in my skills a few months ago, but they found out I was military and said “no”. Umm…isn’t that considered discrimination? Oh well…if they try it again, they’re HR department WILL be contacted along with the VA. There is NO reason for that.

Oh well…now is not the time to be doubting anything. Confidence is key, although I did get rejected from a couple of jobs for being over-qualified. lol

Guess I need to……..

This is how that happened!

Well, yesterday I finished the Twilight Saga…all 4 books…5 including the unfinished draft. I’ve also seen the movie twice. Wow…

It does seem a bit like a romance, but there was enough action so that I was DEEPLY interested in the story. Needless to say, I was impressed with Stephanie Meyer’s writing style. Not quite Anne Rice, but definitely impressive…so much that I was more interested in this story than the Harry Potter story.

I realize now, the reason for my attraction to this story…vampiric romance. The fear of death, the desire for love. Just like in the Vampire Chronicals from Anne Rice, the desire for love/companionship, and the need to quench the thirst are the main components. But this one was different. It was good.

If you plan to try the Saga out, I recommend waiting to watch the movie until after you’ve read the first book. The movie did feel rushed, but after you read the book you’ll appreciate the movie more, and you’ll understand why they had to rush it…way too much story to fit into a 2-hour movie.

How did this happen?

OK…so the wife and I went to bed early last night. I was waiting on storms to arrive, and she was reading. Out of curiosity, I decided to peek over her shoulder and start reading. I was hooked.

It was the 5th book in the Twilight series…or rather, its draft.

The draft was supposed to be a book, but someone leaked the unedited draft to the internet. In response to this the author, Stephanie Meyer, decided to go ahead and put it on her website, therefore we were reading it…legally.

I must stay, I haven’t even considered reading this series, but from because this book is basically the first book, but from a different person’s perspective, I was into it for some reason.

Needless to say, I am now reading the entire series. My wife had already bought all of the books, so I figured why not.

I’m not normally a reader. I prefer movies to books. But when a book makes it to movie form, I generally watch the movie to get the basic characters and storyline, then read the books to get the entire story. I did it with the Harry Potter series and was not disappointed.

I’m hoping that this series turns out just as well…for a guy who reads. :)

A new WHAT?!

PLAYONLINUX UPDATE: OK…well, I had a prior post concerning “PlayOnLinux” that didn’t go too well. A few more of the programs that I tried, did start the installation process, however they didn’t work too well. I knew that I should have checked them on winehq.com I keep forgetting that WINE is the process translating the programs, not this new one. lol

Well…the triplebooting of Ubuntu, Vista and W7 is working pretty good. I’ve noticed that 7 is using the same registry keys as Vista, or something else is going on. I’ve got programs installed under Vista, and when I play them (browsing to the correct location and executing them) they run just fine. Faster, in fact, than in Vista. How is this possible? Supposedly, reviewers of the new OS say that they streamlines the statup/shutdown procedure, but the core is built from Vista (hence the version 6.5) But then again, my Vista has had programs installed and removed many times. Oh well. The programs start and stop faster, but they run just as they did in Vista.

One thing that some folks may not understand….
Even though 7 is a new OS, and many folks still have a bad tast in the mouth from all the initial Vista problems, it is still built from Vista. If your PC runs like crap with Vista now, it may still run like crap on 7. The drivers are the same, therefore the hardware issues are the same. They made have made minor code changes to let it be more forgiving of hardware, but if you refuse to upgrade your hardware, you’ll still have problems with 7.

—————————————————————————-

/rant <on>

OK…so I’m in a retail store the other day, and I hear a customer asking for a new “digital antenna”. Wow…can people not understand the way TV works? Wow… The person came in a few days prior to buy a converter box because of the transition (which is today by the way). No big deal. plenty of folks have bought one. Anyway, they are asking for a digital antenna because their smart-ass geeky teenage neighbor told them it was needed, so here they are. The employee explained to them that it is not necessary as their existing antenna will work (they have an external roof type). They then went on how their neighbor was smarter than the employee and they wanted a “digital antenna”. I had to intercede.

Out of the blue, I gently asked the customer if he needed help (yes, I work there too.) He asked, I answered:

“Sir, there is no special digital antenna that is used for the new broadcasts. What we do have, is an antenna amplifier that will strengthen the broadcast signal that your existing antenna is already picking up, and allow the converter box’s receiver to properly decode the signal.”

He then goes into asking my how I got my information. Well…I am a HAM radio operator, I worked with digital and analog electronics for the military for 11 years, and electronics is one of my hobbies. He pretty much shut up at that point, and then decided to learn more about the technology, which I was GLAD to tell.

/rant <off>

The thing that most folks of his…(demographic, era, age, whatever) seem to misunderstand, is that the frequency of the new broadcasts is damn-near identical to the old ones. However, instead of having 1 frequency per channel, they can put two or 3…all digitally transposed on top of one another and easy for the box to separate.  This changes nothing in respect to the antenna…

The antenna shouldn’t be thought of as a separate device, but rather as an extension of the receiver. The receiver is what receives the signals, IT is what decodes the signals, not the antenna. All the antenna does is pass the signals TO the receiver.

Yes, the antenna is important; without one the receiver won’t have anything to decode, but the only thing about the antenna that is important is the tuning of which signals it will pass.

***WARNING!!! ELECTRICAL THEORY AHEAD!!!***

A basic antenna is a wire. The length of that wire is the key. A long wire will receive low frequencies, a small wire, high ones. FM radio: the frequency in the middle of the band is 98MHz…and the wavelength is just over 10 feet. AM radio has an average frequency of a much lower 1117kHz and a wavelength of 880 feet!! MUCH longer! An antenna of those sizes will pass those frequencies through to the receiver with very little loss. Obviously we don’t have 10 foot antennas on our cars, instead we have one that is 2.5 feet…1/4 of the wavelength. Multiples of 2 usually work well for frequencies. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc. They become less effective as you go shorter, but they work better than nothing at all. If the size is not on one of these multiples, it doesn’t get rejected, just attenuated and lost as wasted energy. You can have multiple sizes on one antenna too…like the ones on a roof antenna. That allows multiple frequencies to be tuned, but it also does a special thing…it amplifies signals coming from one direction! Well…not really, but it does pay much more attention to the signals coming from one direction…a passive amplification. That means that the receiver can have more signal to decode. But what signals get passed along? All of them.

Every signal in the world. Digital, analog, Wifi, Bluetooth, space transmissions, aviation conversation, cellular phones… every frequency, every modulation of signal. EVERYTHING! Any device that has transmitted a signal. That signal goes through space/air and is picked up by the antenna. The AM frequency from a state away. The FM signal from the city TV station. Your neighbor’s Wifi. Your cell phone. They are all being picked up by your TV antenna.  If they happen to be near or on one of the tuned frequencies, they aren’t attenuated and your receiver receives them.

Then IT…the receiver…filters out the ones it doesn’t want and decodes the signal. If it is an AM signal, it processes it as AM. FM, FM. Digital? It sends the signal to a processor to be decoded, translated, then sends that information to your TV or radio. BAM…now your watching 24, or Lost.

So what happens if your neighbors Wifi breaks and starts transmitting on your TV frequency? Are you going to start seeing his net traffic on your TV?  HA HA no. The converter box will only decode the special signal that it was designed to receive. Wifi uses a different protocol of ones and zeros to transmit it’s data, and your converter box isn’t designed to process those.

However if the new, unwanted signal is stronger than the one you want, you’ll lose your picture, or music. This used to be a problem with AM radio, and still is on AM radio and CB radio. Amplitude Modulation.

Ever notice the HUM of an AM radio station? That’s the sound of the 60Hz AC power running along the power lines…bleeding onto the surrounding frequencies. Yes, its a long way from 60kHz to 1MHz, but if the power is unclean, as it usually was back in those days, the power wires act like a giant antenna, sending that 60Hz signal onto all kinds of frequencies. The style of modulation, amplitude modulation, takes the information and amplifies the signal stronger and weaker to change the power of the signal, based on what is being input. A person talking, music…it all modulates the power of the carrier frequency (the tuned frequency of the radio), and you get your NPR. If something creates a noise, or any signal at all on that frequency, your hear it. A tick, static from lightning, etc.

FM, or frequency modulation, doesn’t change the strength, but the frequency instead. It changes the carrier wave by increasing its frequency very slightly up and down. The louder the music or speech, the more the frequency changes…but the power doesn’t. This feature of FM pretty much got rid of any lightning static and the AC hum from power lines, and even today is a fairly strong way of transmitting information. You can still hear a slight lightning tick if a bolt strikes near because the lightning signal is so powerful, but it takes a LOT to lose the signal or bleed over it. The only time I’ve heard bad static or interference is when you have 2 FM radio stations very close together on the radio. You have to be at the right spot where you’re losing one, and getting the new one. Even at the end of the transmitted range, you might get static because the receiver is receiving a signal so weak that it has a hard time decoding it, but you can still hear or see the signal.

Digital is something brand new and something that has a lot of room to grow. Instead of changing the carrier’s strength or frequency, it transmits in a modulation called PM…pulse modulation. This is an on and off switching of the power (similar to AM), but it’s in a digital format. More of an instant on and instant off, in a special sequence that only a converter box or digital-tuner TV can receive. If lightning strikes right outside your house it won’t change the picture (if it doesnt cause power to go out, or blow up the TV). The converter box sees the new signal and ignores it because it doesn’t fit the sequence of data. Done. Nice touch eh? Plus, since it is a digital format, you get the picture as it is meant to be seen…exactly as it is transmitted. The only problem, as many folks are finding our now, is that it’s all or nothing. There is no static to see through because the data can’t be decoded…like a dropped cell phone call, or the cutting in and out of a cell conversation when you’re in the dead-zone with no bars. All or nothing. That’s why the amplifiers are so popular, and why most of the new antennas have one built in.

Your existing antenna will work fine because it ALSO receives the new signals and passes them on to your new TV or converter box. You just might need to buy a DTV amplifier. That’s all.

OK…Sorry about the theory, but it was necessary for me to vent, and if you learned something, cool! If you do wish to read more, feel free to search the web on AM, FM and PM modulations. If you can leave a comment and I’ll fill in.

OMGWTFBBQ!!!

Wow…the “after military world” has really been a difference…especially since the economy went down the tubes. As of now, I’m a grocery stocker at Wal-Mart, and living with the in-laws. It’s not too bad though. We are at least able to pay for the bills, eat, sleep and enjoy some of the day. The wife got into home health care and she’s currently taking care of 3 VA guys. Not too bad for a good 40 hours a week, now I just need to hear something from the 3 govt jobs I applied to…that, and get the VA off their butts and complete my disability from my knee and shoulder surgeries.

Lately, I’ve been on my gaming kick again. Because of not having internet until tomorrow, I bought The Sims 3 and I have to say the game is EXCELLENT! They took away a lot of the problems, and added more stuff for your sim to do. That’s all I can say without spoiling the experience…go grab it for yourself.

Linux…what a wonderful OS. I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and the changes they made really made the OS easier to use, and more enjoyable to play with. I had just installed WINE to try Sims 3, and I found a wonderful program called PlayOnLinux. http://www.playonlinux.com/en/ Instead of paying for Cedega to help you with installing programs for WINE, this one is free of charge…like anything Linux should be. It’s a basic installation…sudo this and sudo that. It’s all explained on the above page.

When you first install the program and get it running, it will install WINE if you need it, and configure it for you. Then, via the ADD button, you can select which program you are installing. It will download teh necessary files/drivers/etc that it needs to properly run the product, then the installation begins. FOr me, The Sims 3 works without a hitch. It does have the usual slow-down from translation of code, but it works great. I highly suggest you give it a try if you want a better Windows product experience.

Other than that, there isn’t anything else going on. See you in a few more weeks!

Yeah…its been a while.

Been trying to work my butt off lately, so I haven’t been able to make many posts, however this one is worth mentioning:

Star Trek

I used to think that Picard was better than Kirk…or at least equal.
We went to the opening day of the new Star Trek movie. My opinion of Kirk has now changed, and I feel like this:

If you want to know why…go see it. Your money will be WELL spent!!!

I wouldn’t be surprised if I try to go see it weekly…if I could only afford it.

Inevitibility

Like most motorcycle riders may know…it’s not if you crash, it’s when.

Well, the same goes for radio control…and it happened this weekend.

The air was warm, the wind calm, and I was in a great mood.

I took off, flew around and generally had some good fun. I decided to bring it in for a touch and go then the wind decided to play a game and before I knew it I was in a tailwind with barely any airspeed.

I’ve flown here at my father-in-laws on quite a few occasions. Every time, I’ve given myself plenty of room to land incase of an abort. Well, this time the tailwind pushed me further down the field than I wanted to go and the engine quit. All at the same time.

Near the end of the landing area, is a small brush pile. You know, the country-style burning brush pile.

I found out that the plane is much less sturdy than it looks.

It may only look like a broken wind and landing gear, but it was also the wing braces, the fuselage-wing mounting pads, and the entire tail. All broken, and ready for the trash.

A more experienced flyer/builder may have been able to salvage this plane, but I cannot.

The good thing, it that the engine and electronics are perfectly sound and work just fine. A basic ARF kit plane is going to set me back from $100 to $300, but all I have to do it put it together and start flying.

Economics

Normally, I wouldn’t talk much about economics, and that includes tonight.

The job front has been going well…except for a recent issue that I’ve only now been able to relax over.

My last job, Wyle, turned out to be a no-go. I was doing good. All my coworkers were praising me for my inthusiasm, quick learning, work habits, but unfortunately for me, the boss wasn’t so impressed.

His 3 main rules that he based his employees on are: Attitude, Integrity, and Teamwork.

I had a great attitude towards the job. It included my 3 favorite things…electronics, mechanics and computers. I didnt have a problem at all with my attitude, and it took quite a bit to make me upset. Every once in a while I would get frustrated, but that only was because of my unfamiliarity with the system, and my impatience…I kept thinking that I should’ve picked it up quicker than I was…I was pushing myself too hard.

I had the intregity from my 11 years of military experience. Put me to work, and I do what was expected of me. I wouldn’t slack off, and I would act the was I was supposed to, even when noone was looking.

The teamwork was not a problem for me, nor for my coworkers. If they needed help, I would help thim without their asking. If I needed help, or didn’t understand something, I would gladly ask for their help. Here is where the boss didn’t agree, and to this day, I still have no direct answer from him.

My initial employment was meant to be a 90-day probationary period through a local temporary employment agency. Why, I have no idea. I applied directly with the company, I was interviewed by the company, and I was being hired by the company, but he decided to make me fill out the paperwork for the employment agency. I was now being hired by them, to work FOR Wyle. BS.

The next 3 months went by well. No problems other than the usual 45-day feedback where my strenghts and weakness are brought to light. No big deal. Changes made, press forward.

1 week and 1 day before my 90-days is up, I work my day, continue to learn, and I’ve already made plans to continue my work the following day. I get home from work, and I get a call from the temp agency. I’ve been released. WHAT?! How?! Why?!

They say it was because of my work performance. I call the shop. They’re stunned! I call my friend who is directly under the boss. He didn’t even know. He called the boss and was told that it was nobody’s decision but his own. Excuse me? (He told me that his production and floor supervisors are the hire/no-hire decision for him. They both liked me just fine and had already said they were saying “yes” to my hiring.) So he threw everyone out, and lets me go on his own accord. Fine.

I tried to call him. No answer. I asked my friend to find out why not? He tells my friend that it’s his decision only, and to drop it.

I called the temp agency to get more specific details. They said that it was my teamwork and not my job performance. Ok…so now they’re changing stories.

I called a few friends on the floor, and from what has happened, it seems that I had too much initiative…and that scared the boss. That was the feeling that they got from the boss on that next week.

Too much initiative? What am I, a drone? Am I supposed to blindly follow orders? Oh wait…he’s the type of manager that micromanages everything, and if he doesn’t tell you to do it, you don’t do it.

His story:

Joins the military, gets up in rank, but wants to manage things because he wants them run HIS way. So, he goes to officer school and become a low-ranking officer. Yet again, he is not in a management position. He backs down into the reserves, becomes a “Yes” man for 1 weekend a month and 2 weeks during the year, and uses his officer status to manage a civilian company. He is the type of manager that I can deal with, but I don’t like very much. He is the type of manager that has the book-smarts to know how things work theoretically, but cannot adapt the theories to follow changes in the environment.

I have been out of work for 2 weeks, and applied to the unemployment agency. They have declared me ineligible for benefits because I quit my job. WHAT?! QUIT?! They were told by the temp agency, that after I was notified, I did not call them back to see if they had work for my last week and 1 day. Therfore I quit. Umm…no. I did call them, and they said I was being released and had no further reason to contact them. My contract was terminated by Wyle, therfore I was FIRED and should be eligible for benefits. I’ve appealed it.

On a good note, I’ve got applications in with most of the aviation industry, and I’m in talks with Bell Helicopter out of Amarillo, and with a military-hire company based out of Dallas, and they have me in with a few more companies. Hopefully I’ll hear something this week.