July 23, 2005
Luke cries much less now
Today I adjusted some of his potentiometers and replaced some capacitors. After I reattached his head, he puts out much less noise.
July 21, 2005
CyberVisit to 6 Casuarina Walk
In case you are wondering why there has been a dearth of enthusiastic photos and baby stories, I invite you for a moment to 6 Casuarina Walk at 0700 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2400 0200 0400 daily, and for fifty minutes each, not ten seconds.
July 11, 2005
Growing Boy
In the last two weeks Luke has grown about 64g per day, that's the equivalent of eleven US quarters.
July 10, 2005
A guessing game
Ling and I are sick of having a kid, so today we decided to go back to our old routine of weekend japanese lunch at Kuriya. Luke in tow, we took a detour at the children's nursery where Ling looked for some spare parts. While she changed his pants in the nursery, I wandered over to the toy section to see what they had.
Lots of useless Mobile Suit Gundam models, Nissan Nismo models, Max Biaggi motorcycle models. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
What caught my eye? A remote control helicopter. What caught my eye about it? It's $70SGD price tag.
Now I'm going to turn this into a game. Everyone ought there gets to guess was $70SGD buys in the world of the RC Helicopter. I'll give you a few clues:
July 02, 2005
HF Propagation Analysis
What are my openings to Pittsburgh?
On Thursday I attended a presentation on HFWin32 Propagation Software created by U.S. Department of Commerce NTIA/ITS Institute for Telecommunication Sciences.
9V1CW (Enno) showed examples of using the program to calculate HF propagation between two locations. Every sort of parameter is tunable -- propagation models, sunspot activity, antenna type, location, time, etc. It's quite cool.
I downloaded the software tonight to try myself. When I saw this dialog box, I knew I was in for a long night:
It appears the software was written beginning maybe ten+ years ago, during the twilight between command-line and windows, and has been hacked and tinkered with ever since. The interface/gui is seriously funky. This is weird enough, but what I really need is a proper user guide. There are, as I said, countless parameters which makes it really easy to make this black-box spit out a lot of absolutely meaningless data if I'm not careful.
I think that if you can get over the grotesque 1995 interface and get a core set of parameters you understand and trust, it's probably a pretty neat program.
Here is a nice summary article of HF Propagation Software available. It's undated unfortunately, but it's a start.
