Tom & Nan Dot Com

Well we went to the Alabama Jubilee in Decatur again this year… I think this was the 5th year in a row. Weather was absolutely beautiful but the wind was almost dead calm. Only two balloons launched on Saturday evening and flew for about 15 minutes and only went about 150 yards. Got to see Joel, the Remax balloon pilot.  We were treated to the best balloon glow we’ve ever seen.

On Sunday we changed it up and went to the Tennessee Renaissance Festival, our first trip to a renfest. Saw the end of the only human chess game (huzzah) and two joust matches (HUZZAH). Since this was our first time to a Renaissance Festival we didn’t know what to expect, but had a pretty good time.

We toured the Castell Gwynn, the castle/home built by Mike Freeman… yes, it’s his home. We got to see the kitchen, a hallway lined with tapestries and a room that had a very high ceiling with a candle chandelier that is raised and lowered to light/replace the candles.

I don’t have a lot of pics to share but here are a few.

Alabama Jubilee Balloon Festival

Renaissance Festival

Castell Gwynn

Tape-a-Talk is a great app for Ham Radio operations.

I installed Tape a Talk on my Droid Razr Maxx “stupid” phone a few months ago and just found a great use for it. When I’m working HF mobile I record the contacts. I then dictate the contact time and frequency onto the recording and can log the contact on my paper log book and my HRD log book at a later date. Now I don’t miss logging contacts. Someday I’ll start sending QSL cards out.

There has been a lot of buzz on the Internet over the past couple of days about a kids rule book that was found by a young Citrus Heights, California Wal-Mart employee named Raymond Flores.  The book contains 158 rules, handwritten by a child that has to be around 7 or 8 years old.  Rule number 158 was not actually entered, there’s just a number for the rule.

There is a lot of buzz because he is trying to return the book to it’s rightful owner. I think we have a lot to learn from this smart little kid. In my opinion these rules go to the heart of what our mom’s and dad’s taught us when we were little. In my opinion they can be applied to life of kids and grown-ups alike.  I’m know guilty of breaking some them and I’ll bet most people are.

I transcribed the rules that Mr. Flores read in a video on his Facebook page.  I know there are three spelling errors and I’m sure there are others.  Since I do not know where other spelling errors are I’ve corrected the ones I know about. Here my transcript of all of the rules:

1. No talking back

2. No Pushing

3. No Screaming

4. Be Safe

5. Listen

6. No being gross

7. Help others

8. Care with others

9. No being bad

10. Have fun at all times

11. No lying

12. No whining

13. Be positive

14. Be a good Communicator

15. Be responsible

16. Be respectful

17. Say sorry

18. Say please

19. Say thank you

20. Have good manners

21. No yelling

22. Be nice to books

23. Use good language

24. No teasing

25. Don’t make fun of others

26. When sleeping, don’t wake others

27. Do what the parents ask you to do

28. Be unique

29. Be yourself

30. Don’t copy others

31. Don’t cheat on tests

32. Study for tests

33. Exercise

34. Do things equally with each other

35. Do things yourself

36. Do your homework

37. No stealing

38. No making unwanted noise

39. No saying ew when someone farts

40. Say excuse me

41. Don’t color on people

42. Don’t color on peoples paper

43. No spitting

44. No squeezing others

45. Try to compliment

46. Don’t say no

47. Don’t cry

48. No pulling hair

49. No turning your back

50. No punching

51. No getting into others faces

52. No going under the bed only if necessary

53. keep your gum in your mouth

54. No ruining bedding

55. No coloring in rule book

56. No jumping on bed

57. No ignoring others

58. No hiding from others

59. No being loud

60. Put your shoes by the front door when you take them off

61. Wear anything you want to

62. Keep dogs away from cats

63. Don’t call each other names

64. clean up your messes

65. no eating other peoples food

66. go to bed at bedtime

67. Do your homework

68. Don’t have a party without parents

69. If there is one bathroom go to the bathroom fast

70. Keep the environment clean

71. don’t  go running in the street or the parking lot

72. Don’t play with knives

73. Have a parent guide you when cooking

74. Sit on your chair correctly

75. Drink water a lot

76. Don’t touch hot things unless with a parent

77. Try to get good grades on tests

78. Share

79. Try to bee good big sister/brother

80. Stop at stop signs and stop lights

81. Wear a seatbelt

82. Pay attention in class

83. Don’t steal

84. Wake up when you need to

85. Don’t get into other people’s business

86. No running when it is slippery

87. Always be polite

88. No ditching

89. Go when you have to go

90. Never leave a friend behind

91. Don’t go running / walking on a basketball court if someone is playing basketball

92. Ask permission

93. Don’t promise if you’re going to break it

94. Keep hands to yourself

95. Don’t talk with your mouth full

96. Don’t pick other people up

97. Don’t eat right before going to the dentist

98. Don’t bite the dentist

99. Don’t drive into road work

100. Don’t suck your fingers

101. Do your chores

102. Don’t text and drive at the same time

103. No toys at the table

104. Eat the food you get served with

105. Tie your shoes or you will fall

106. no elbows on the table

107. Chew with your mouth closed

108. Don’t eat when your mouth is numb

109. No bribing

110. Help new students

111. Go through detector in stores

112. Try to make things fair

113. Don’t talk to strangers

114. Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to

115. Don’t go on top of other people in pools

116. Keep your friends secrets

117. If there is no space between one person you want to sit by don’t cry or whine because there is no room

118. Don’t keep plsaying please if someone says no

119. Don’t eat your boogers from picking your nose

120. Don’t sleep with your toys

121. Don’t keep other people awake after bed time

122. Pay for everything you want to buy at the store

123. Blow your nose not pick your nose

124. Don’t run in the house

125. No pulling hair

126. Recycle

127. No littering

128. Don’t be bossy

129. Don’t play with your toys at night time

130. Don’t talk people’s ears off

131. Read / listen instructions

132. Go to bed early if you have dance in the morning

133. Don’t stuff your mouth

134. Let the dentist work in your mouth

135. Let the doctor work on your body

136. Warn others about danger

137. No cheating on other people

138. Tell the teacher if you’re leaving

139. If you wet your bed wear a pull-up

140. Don’t watch TV after bed time

141. Don’t chew gum at school

142. Don’t chew gum if you wear braces

143. No toys at school

144. Act in a mature way with self control an respect others

145. Don’t ignore friends and parents

146. Don’t get into people’s way if they’re playing with a hula hoop

147. Don’t bounce on hula hoops

148. Don’t skip detention

149. Don’t skip school unless you’re sick

150. Keep your sleeves to yourself

151. Keep your feet and shoes to yourself

152. Keep your hair to yourself

153. Ask if they’re ok

154. Protect this rule book

155. Protect each other

156. No touching other people’s body parts

157. No poking

158

I’ve gone to the dark side… Partly gone to the dark side anyway. I went out today and bought a Mac mini.  Yes, I agree with Nan that I didn’t NEED it, but I wanted it so I could learn all about Mac’s. I still have the Windows 7 64bit beast and I won’t be giving it up any time soon, All of our pictures, my development tools, and my music is on it.

The Mac mini entry level system has an Intel Core i5 running at 2.3 GHz and 2GB of 1333 RAM. FOr the non-geekers out there it’s kind of on the slow side if it were a Windows PC… BUT, I’m told the Operating System is slimmed down. It doesn’t have to support the wide range of hardware that Windows tries to support… It only has to run on systems built by Apple… so, I was initially expecting it to be a little sluggish, but it’s not. It came with OS X Lion 10.7 and hooks to a standard keyboard, mouse, and monitor.  I’m surprised at how smoothly it runs.

So… Now I get to learn all about how the innards of how this system works too, and I’ll get to play around with interoperability of it with both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux. Will probably be playing a lot with remote desktop so that I don’t need extra monitors, keyboards and mice.

You can read all about the Mac mini on Apples’s web site (www.apple.com). When you get there just pick the Mac menu and then click on the Mac mini.

I included the picture so you could get an idea of how small the box is, EVERYTHING fit inside of the box.  Power cord, video adaptor, user manual, and the Mac mini.

Since I’ve been asked… Here’s how *I* digitize vinyl… there are many ways to do it, There are lots of different tools that you can use.  This is how *I* do it at the moment on my Windows 7 computer.

The procedures I use make it a tedious process but the results are well worth the effort to preserve all of that keepsake vinyl a lot of people still have stashed in closets. Since there are a lot of steps, I’m going to break this up into three posts over the next week or so. When you’re done you can play the files on your IPod, or any other device that can play MP3s.

Other parts of the Digitizing Vinyl series:

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 1-A (additional info for dbx encoded records)

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 2

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 3

This is Part 1 – Capturing the file and performing limited digital processing.

In this section you’re going to capture a side of an album, process it and then save it.

Stuff you need:

1. Turntable (line level preamp included)
2. Computer with line input (duh)
3. A copy of Audacity (Awesome Free Software)
4. A copy of the MP3 CODECs (Code/Decodes sound to MP3)
5. A copy of MP3TAG

Do this for each side of the record:
If you have a record cleaning brush to clean the grooves use it… The more lint, dust and other crud you remove from the record, the better.

Steps:

Step 1.

Capture the entire album side with Audacity in 1 run. If you have skips you’re going to need to work them as you see fit; I try to manually hold the tone-arm back when I know there are skips, I’ve surprised myself by making recordings of a few scratched albums that you can’t tell were scratched in the final MP3.

Step 2.

Save the file in Audacity’s native file format (.aup)

 

Step 3.

Select the entire album (ctrl+A)

Step 4.

 
Select the Effect Menu, then Select Click Removal, Then select the remove clicks button… Wait

 

Step 5.

Use the left scroll slider on the bottom of the screen to select the very beginning of the album, it’ll be as far to the left as it can go.

Step 6.

Find an area at the beginning of the record where there’s surface noise from the record but no scratches or pops and NO MUSIC. Select a VERY NARROW area in the noise.

Step 7.

Select the Effect Menu, Select Noise Removal, and then click the "Get Noise Profile" button.
Note: if you select a large area of noise, the final product won’t sound very good.

 

Step 8.

Select the entire album again (ctrl+A)

Step 9.

Select the Effect Menu, Select Noise Removal, and then click the "Remove Noise" button.

After the noise removal procedure completes the noise signature goes almost flat as depicted in the next image:

Step 10.

The last step is to Save the file again so that you save all of the work you just completed… Select File, and then select Save.

That is the end of the capture and processing and the end of Part 1 of this series…

Part 2 of this series will describe chopping and exporting the individual tracks into individual mp3 files.
Part 3 will tell you how to tag the file and add album art.

I recently ran across an article from the February 25th 1995 issue of Newsweek (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.html) written by Clifford Stoll entitled “The Internet? Bah!”.  In it he asks “Do our computer pundits lack all common sense?” and states that online databases won’t replace our daily newspaper that CD-ROMs can’t take the place of a competent teacher and that computer networks won’t change the way government works…

Funny thing is that he’s dead wrong. Many daily newspapers have resorted to putting their news online, you can read for a fee, or sometimes you can go to sites that have it up for free… Yahoo News, CNN, and many other places put it up for free. Computer based training supplements competent teachers now, there are many colleges that offer courses online where you do the same work as you would when attending classroom based instruction, except that you have to be more motivated to not procrastinate your work. Finally, government has moved many (not all) functions online, You can eFile your tax return.  If you’re unemployed, you apply online, most interaction with the Social Security Administration is accomplished online… the list goes on…

Stoll complains about how “word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers”, about electronic publishing and how the “myopic glow of a clunky computer” is unpleasant compared to the “friendly pages of a book”.  Funny thing is that Mr. Stoll didn’t take into account advances in technology; we now have sleek elegant e-readers like the Nook, the Kindle and the iPad. In 1995 he doubts “we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet.” He couldn’t be further from the truth…

Another complaint is about how the “Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data”.  Enter Google… Mr. Stoll was writing about things as they were in February 1995.  The Internet was a fledgling network with only about 5.8 million machines hooked to it… Today we’re rapidly approaching the exhaustion of nearly 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses.  In 1995 we didn’t have Google to filter, index and catalog it.

Mr. Stoll complains that “What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact”. Now we have Facebook… Instead of telephones, families and friends keep in contact with each other from across town, across the state, across the country or around the world. Today, many people use the Internet to remain in touch on his “electronic wonderland” of the so-called information superhighway.

My opinion is that Mr. Stoll didn’t take innovation and invention into account. He could not possibly have seen Google, or Facebook,  He couldn’t have seen the potential for video on demand through YouTube.  He couldn’t have seen smartphones, digital cameras or any of the other advances in technology that we now take for granted.

So where will we be in another  16 years? I don’t know, but I’ve always been an early adopter and in the words of Timbuk 3, “The Futures So Bright”.

As I write this there is an area of low pressure about 500 miles NE of the Leeward Islands with a 20% chance of becoming a “subtropical” cyclone in the next 48 hours. That said, today is the last day of the 2011 hurricane season in the Atlantic basin. How did we fare this year?

In August, Dr. Gray issued an update to his seasonal forecast.  In it he called for 9 hurricanes with 5 of them being major hurricanes.  He called for 16 named storms, down one from his June 2011 forecast of 17 named storms. Meanwhile, the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) also updated their outlook for the season too.  In it they called for 14 – 19 named storms, 7 –10 hurricanes, and 3 – 5 major hurricanes.

How many named storms did we actually get?

Storm Name	Dates	Max Wind (MPH)
TS Arlene	20 June – 1 July	65
TS Bret	17 – 22 July	65
TS Cindy	20 – 22 July	70
DS Don	27 – 30 July	50
TS Emily	1 – 7 August	50
TS Franklin	12 – 13 August	45
TS Gert	13 – 16 August	65
TS Harvey	19 – 22 August	60
MH Irene	20 – 28 August	120
TS Jose	28 – 29 August	45
MH Katia	29 August – 10 September	135
TS Lee	2 – 5 September	60
H Maria	6 – 16 September	80
H Nate (1)	7 – 11 September	70
MH Ophelia	21 September – 3 October	140
H Philipe	24 September – 9 October	90
H Rina	23 – 28 October	110
TS Sean	7 – 11 November	65 (2)

Note 1. Hurricane Nate was upgraded during post-storm analysis to hurricane status. I haven’t seen the maximum observed wind on Nate so I’ve left the 70mph number as is.

Note 2. The strongest report I can find on maximum sustained winds in TS Sean were 65mph. NHC has not yet issued their final summary on the season, so I’ll update this post if 65mph was NOT the maximum wind for this storm.

Scorecard

I count 18 named storms though I’ve seen attempts by others in other places to count Tropical Depression 10 as a named storm.  My scorecard for the early forecasts:

	CPC	Dr. Gray	Actual
Number Named	14 – 19	16	18
Hurricanes	7 – 10	9	6
Maj Hurricanes	3 – 5	5	3

While we had more than the average number of named storms, our number of actual hurricanes was about average.  The increased number of named storms can be attributed to better sensing technology, modeling capabilities, and forecasting abilities. Four of the named storms had winds of 50 miles per hour (or less) many of which might not have been caught 20 or 30 years ago.

As far as storms go, my philosophy is that it’s better to be prepared and not have a storm rather than not be prepared and actually getting one.  I like to attempt to try to forecast where they will go before the National Hurricane Center starts issuing forecasts on them… I did that last year and again this year.  My best forecast was for Irene.  I predicted it would “Rake the east coast” with a landfall in North Carolina approximately a week before it did… was my best attempt at forecasting a hurricane ever.

What’s Ahead?

Storm names for 2012 from the National Hurricane Center:

Alberto
Beryl
Chris
Debby
Ernesto
Florence
Gordon
Helene
Isaac
Joyce
Kirk
Leslie
Michael
Nadine
Oscar
Patty
Rafael
Sandy
Tony
Valerie
William

Our next hurricane season begins in just 185 days… Are you ready? If not follow the old scout motto of “Be Prepared” so make a plan and be ready!

We took a trip over the Thanksgiving Holiday to Pulaski, Tennessee.  Pulaski has a rich history and ties to the US Civil War. Pulaski is the county seat of Giles County. It’s city square features a courthouse that was built in 1859.

Pulaski is the site where Union soldiers hung Sam Davis. Sam Davis was a Confederate scout who saw action at Cheat Mountain, Shenendoah, Shiloh, and Perryville. He was captured by Union forces near Minor Hill, Tennessee on November 20th, 1863 and was hung on November 27th 1863, his 21st birthday.  There is a statue of Sam Davis on the south side of the courthouse square in Pulaski.

Pulaski was also the original birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 by group of former Confederate soldiers. One of our geocaching adventures took us here.

We’ve been to Pulaski several times over the years and the old section of town hasn’t changed much, but the city has expanded to the southwest a bit and now is home to a Home Depot and a Super Wal-mart store. US-64, the main east-west highway through Pulaski, was recently 4-laned and goes past the site of the Bodenham School. Bodenham was a K-12 school that operated here from 1928 to 1978. The school was closed and schools in the county were centralized with 2 High Schools remaining in Giles County.

The only parts of the school that remain are parts of the foundation for the main building and  second building that is now a day care.

 

So, how would I know so much about the area? I lived in Giles County off and on in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My dad bought land here and built a log cabin and is buried not far up the road from where he lived. I attended Bodenham for part of the 7th grade, moved away and attended Giles County High for 2 years. Since my Dad died, my mom has moved to the area.  Two of my brothers are graduates of Giles County High School. I visit as often as I can and enjoy Geocaching in the area, I like driving the windy country roads, which were all dirt when I lived there as a teenager but have all since been paved. I like the friendliness of the people and still have friends that live in the area. I’ve never lived anywhere else where people, total strangers to me, wave a friendly hello as we drive past each other on the back-roads; I wave back!

So why am I posting this to our long neglected site for our family and friends to view??? I took all the photographs that I’m posting here at the request of a co-worker of Nan’s, Miss Pat. Miss Pat almost bought a house in Giles County years ago and was surprised to hear that we visit often. She asked that we take some pictures so here are the best of the rest of the photos I took in Pulaski for Miss Pat.

 

 

 

WARNING:  This is a technical geeky post my Internet firewall… friends and family not interested need to read no further…

For friends and family still with me here, iptables is the software in my Internet firewall that keeps the big bad Internet hackers from poking at my computers and causing problems.

I’ve been studying  the docs and looking at other people’s examples around cyberspace and got it working…  One ot the problems I’ve run into was when I tried to ping out to the world.  if I tried to ping www.google.com I got this message back:

ping: sendmsg: operation not permitted

I’m running ubuntu server 10.04LTS as a border gateway/firewall.  Lots of discussion on the net, and a few gave me clues but didn’t solve the problem…  The hints were that it was a firewall issue… ok.. no worries…  here is the code I used to fix the problem:

iptables -A OUTPUT -o $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 0 -j ACCEPT

iptables -A OUTPUT -o $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -i $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 0 -m limit –limit 10/s -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -i $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 8 -m limit –limit 1/s -j ACCEPT

The problem I had was I couldn’t remember which icmp type was the echo request and which was the echo reply… Time to look at the RFC (for friends and family, RFCs are “Requests For Comments”).  They are the specifications on how the Internet works.  Ping uses a language called ICMP or “Internet Control Message Protocol” and ICMP is just one of MANY specifications out there.  Turns out that the pings I was sending out were being blocked by my own firewall. A ping, known as an echo-request, is type 8 in the spec. The responses, known as echo-replies are type 0 in the spec. I had them backwards.  So I fixed it once I figured the problem out, and set it up so my system can also respond to pings from my ISP but you’ll notice I’m limiting stuff on my input to prevent misuse by people on the outside…  The four lines above do the following:

Line 1:  Allows my machine to send out ping replies.

Line 2: Allows me to send out ping requests

Line 3: Allows replies to pings I send out to come back.  I’m limiting the replies in case a hacker tries to flood me with unsolicited replies.

Line 4: Limits incoming ping requests, I’m limiting these to prevent hackers from flooding me with ping requests.

Now when I send pings out I get the replies back instead of bombing out with an error. I don’t claim the limiting I’ve implemented will stop all abuse that hackers might dish out, but it will slow them down enough so our home network will stay up instead of going down cold.

Welcome to fall, again… We have a few interesting tidbits to shed some light on…

NHC has designated Ophilia a hurricane. It’s forecast to safely miss the US. as of this writing it’s moving NNW at 10 knots and it’s packing 100kt sustained winds with gusts up to 120kt and a Tropical storm warning is in effect for Bermuda. Official forecast and models brings the storm due east of the island by 8pm Eastern time on the 1st.

In our neck of the woods we’re going to see our first dip of the mercury below 50 degrees for this season. should be in the upper 40s tomorrow morning.

Fall is definitely in full swing as the annual change of colors is in full swing up north and I’ve even seen a maple tree here turn yellowish brown leaves out.

The weather has been perfect for the past few days, and it’s going to get better over the next few days… and the models show good weather for at least the next week. It’s a great time to live in paradise.

If you’re out and about in the local area, check out the Destin Seafood Festival (in Destin, Florida).