Sometimes, I hate weekends

Particularly LONG weekends.

A lot of the work at my job runs 24x7, and when I come in after a long weekend, there are usally all sorts of issues to deal with. Sigh

Wire Management - again

How come, in this day and age of way too many wires, we don't see desks, either for the home, or for the office, with good cable/wire management features? Wire troughs, outlets trips build in, etc?

Yes, I know wireless stuff is becomeing more common now, but that just means you'll have a USB or charger cable up to the desk, along with at least one monitor data cable and power cable, probably a keyboard and mouse cable (or else a cable up for the wireless head)

Cable Management

Did a bit of cable cleanup today - No, the lan cable and the power strip you see on the floor were NOT included

Gahhhh

Forgot my Medic ID necklace AND my USB thumb drive at home today (they stay together).

I swear that some days I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached

Shack Updates

Well, I never have gotten the beam up. Two years later, it's still sitting in the yard. I can't find anyone to install it, because no one waht the liability of bolting it to the roof. I might just have to save up, and out up say a 40 ft crankup in the yard.

One thing I really want to do in the shack is change my desk around. It's a mess. I really think I'm going to make or buy a couple of desktop "turret" racks to mount all the ham gear in, plus put say a 2.5 or 3 ft rack under the desk to mount all the computer stuff and power supplies in.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

Not The Post but... Visual Studio on a Mac?

I still have not gotten my deep thought post written, the brain just has not been into it (hey, the leg has been bothering me, so..)

Anyway, I've been thinking about getting a new Laptop (the current 'personal' laptop is a PIII based unit...)

I've heard some good things about Macbook pros laptops runing Vista under either Parallels or VMWare. Have any of you had any experience running Vista/Visual Studio 2008 (and in particular VB.NET) on a Macbook pro?

Comments?

Merged Post III

Friday, June 1, 2007
IS Code our enemy? (Computers - not Morse)
This Morning, Jeff Atwood over at "Coding Horror" wrote an article The Best Code is No Code Commenting on Code is our enemy over at Skrentablog

I happen to think BOTH posters are right and wrong. I'll agree with Jeff that Brevity is extremely important, BUT not at the expense of robustness.

Of course, code that does NOT exist is the most robust code there is.

Rich says that there are 3 kinds of code. Stable (aka code that doesn't change over time), Code that gets worse, and Code that gets better. I feel that there are really 4 kinds. The addition is code that RARELY changes

I see a lot of this RARELY change code, but the joke is, this is where I see some of the worst code, because when it does change, it may be a decade since it last changed, and NO one really knows the code anymore, and it often has lots of dependencies hung off of it. THIS is the code that probably needs both the best decoupling and DRY - even though it rarely changes

Merged Post 1

Programmer Productivity
Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has a great post on the relative speed of various CPUs when doing common programming tasks at .

I wish I could get my bosses to understand this. I work on an old 530 Mhz single core PC, with 1 gig of Memory, and that's because I begged for an upgrade.

Silly, huh?

Miscellaneous Musings

It's been a LONG time since I posted. My ham radio life has been very slow, as I've been VERY busy. Mom was in and out of the hospital and rehab (Lung Cancer) etc

Anyway, one major problem I had in my station at home was NASTY 'birdies' all up and down the band from my LAN. This is a fairly common problem. I decided to try and fix the problem. Now, as I already HAD shielded Cat-6 cables in place, I knew that was not going to fix the problem. What I did was make up Cat-5e cables that had a type 43 ferrite at BOTH ends. (small ones - 1/2 hole, about 3/4" long). I had to cut off the connectors and put on new ones. I did it scientifically - one cable at a time, one end at a time. Interestingly, at least on MY LAN, the end near the PC was MUCH more important than the end at the router! I'll guess that the LAN circuits in the PC are less balanced than they are in my router (a Linksys). I lowered the noise at the 'birdie' points from about s-6 to about s-1, so I'd say I made a huge improvement.

This last weekend, I replaced my temporary coax to my 80m/17m dipole with it's permanent coax. Now I don't have to open my rear door to use the antenna. Make me a tad more likely to actually USE the antenna

I've had a bunch of cards come in, and I'd like to thank all the stations who sent me cards.

I'm seriously thinking I'm going to order an NMO mount saw. I have a few friends (Hi Pete (w2irt) and John (KB3MTK)) who need antennas put on their trucks (both Ford Rangers...). My old truck was a Ranger, so I know the tricks with that one.

Sometime this winter (actually next 2 months or so) I should be putting up a beam. Going with a Glen Martin 4ft rooftop tower, probably a 6ft mast. I have a MA-33 that I got from the old Knickerbocker Yacht Club station (Thanks Guys). I eventually want to put a SteppIR up there, but that'll wait. Still debating WHICH coax to use. I keep waffling on that.

Unfortunately, I won't get much contesting done this fall. It's an election year, and my job is related to the elections, so I'll be working 7 days/week until after the election.

73 de KG2V - and Good DX (sunspots? What's a sunspot)