Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Breaking News

Michael Jackson is still dead.

(and so is Generalissimo Francisco Franco)

Endocrinologist visit

Went to my endocrinologist yesterday

First the bad news - I gained weight (boo)

The good news - my A1C is down to 5.8

This is kind of a shock to me, as I expected it to have gone UP. My average readings have gone up, but that is partly because I've started to have a mid morning and late afternoon snack. Good news on a whole I guess

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Dentist turned out to be no big deal

Woot!
Turned out not to be a big deal - the chip was small enough that they were able to bond on some sort of plastic or something - no drilling, no pain, in an out in 15 minutes.

While I was there, I made an apointment for my cleaning. As I go every 3 months, that's usually not too bad

Monday, July 06, 2009

Dentist tonight

I woke up Friday moring, a spit out a small chunk of my left rear lower molar - joy, but luckly no pain. I had a choice - travel about 1 hour, and mess up my weekend, or wait - DDS said "it's OK to wait if you're not in pain", so tonight is the night

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Oh so true

A quote from Tocqueville

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to my lovely wife Mary, and to Canada

Monday, June 29, 2009

Billy Mays

First there was Ed,
Then Farah,
Then MJ

But wait, there's more...

Didn't do Field Day

Missed Field Day for the 3rd year in a row.

Sheet rocking on Friday ran LATE - but we got started late, so I didn't get the 1st coat of tape up. Ended up doing that on Saturday AM, then had to spend the rest of the early afternoon running to Home Depot, and the local appliance place(AC in the den died last summer - time to replace it)

Sunday I went "Upstate" - aka the Kingston Area (West Hurley and Lamontville). The Ashokan was going over the spillway and the woods were WET. Nice party for Jane's graduation, and it was GOOD to see everyone. The last time I saw most of them was just over a year ago at Dad's Funeral. I normally get up there 4-5 times a year, but the last couple of years have been crazy. I hope to get up there (and to PA to visit with John and Lyn) a LOT more now that things have calmed down a bit in my life

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Field Day 2009

I was really really hoping to make it to Field Day this year, but last Friday I received an invite to a friend's Daughter's High School Graduation. This is one I will NOT miss. I hope to get to play some on Saturday, after putting a 2nd coat of taping compound on the spare bedroom ceiling at Mom and Dad's place

Look for KG2V as either a 1D or 1E (depends on how I feel) from NLI section (probably 1D)

Dix Hills Soccer Tournament - A wet time

So, on Saturday, I took Hugh out to the Tournement. His club had 2 teams playing, and Hugh got to play with the more advanced players, despite not normally playing with them. (They were short handed, ended up playing with only 2 subs)

They won 1, lost 2, but played well

Sunday, Mary took him out, and they tied 1 (against the other club team) and lost the other game

Saturday, the Coach was happy, despite the record, as the kids played well, and tried. I gather that on Sunday, this was NOT the case

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Dr Seuss for the internet age

http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=4440353&cpp=1

Breakup Songs

Today I was listening to Matt Pinfield on WRXP, when Leslie said "Everyone has a breakup song"

WRONG

I married my childhood sweetheart, and we're still together

There is only ONE bad thing I can think of with marrying your childhood sweetheart - it's that they remember all the stupid things you used to do when you were a teenager

Mary, Thanks for puuting up with me for all these years

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Air France 447

First, may the victims rest in peace

What worries me (and HAS to be worrying Airbus) - Have you looked at the photos of the wreckage? A nice ripped off vertical stabilizer floating on the water. Now where have we seen that before?

Oh yeah - American Flight 587 which crashed in the Rockaways when the vertical stabilizer ripped off an Airbus A300

Normally, when you look at plane crashes, you'll see that the "tail feathers" (Vertical and Horizontal Stabs, rudder, elevator etc) stay together, as that section of the airplane is fairly "beefy"

Another thing that worries me - from what I gather, Airbus and Boeing have VERY different ways of looking at "fly by wire" - I gather that with Airbus, the software will do what it wants, no matter what you want, with Boeing, you can override the software

Why is this relevant? Having actually read the AA-587 crash report, they blame the crash on the pilot making excessive rudder inputs, and ripping the VS off the plane, when he got stuck in turbulence. I don't buy it. We have a few pilots here - if you were stuck in an emergency/rough turbulence - you going to be doing much with the rudder? Ailerons make you turn, the rudder makes it pretty. I still believe that the VS was already parting ways with the A300 and the pilot was trying to compensate - that the turbulence of the previous flight was causing the plane to come apart

Now we have an A320, in turbulence, over the Atlantic that comes apart.. I'll bet that Airbus hopes they never find those black boxes

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Dix Hills Soccer Tournament this weekend

This weekend is the 2009 Ken Graff Jr. Memorial Father's Day Tournament. My son HUgh will be playing with the U-8s from Jigs Soccer. Should be fun.

Bencher BY-1 Paddle Mod

I had some ham radio fun this weekend. For a while, I've been thinking of modifying my old Bencher BY-1 paddles to use a 1/8" mini-jack instead of a cable. Makes things a bit easier to swap in and out. I'll modify my Kent paddles next.

Take a look

Monday, June 15, 2009

Wow, didn't realize it's been this long

Sorry about the gap, but I've been twittering, and facebooking

The good news - last time I went to the MD, I got my A1C down to 6.0, not half bad, but recently (last 10 days or so), my blood glucose has been high - can't figure it out

The last week - 10 days, the gym has been lagging due to work and not feeling great.

I'll have some ham radio posts SOON - have done some interesting things in the shop, some Ham releated and some shooting sports related

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Good Workout - and watch out for those carbs

Good workout today. I went to the gym expecting problems, as my left ankle was really bothering me, plus my left bicep was sore, but I had no problem.

One interesting thing, I've been going to the gym less than 1 week, and I had been doing some aerobic exercise at physical therapy, but my peak as well as average heart rates for the same treadmill workout has already fallen 10 BPM! Not bad.

Yesterday, I got home, to Hugh to soccer, and Anna to dance, then checked my BG levels - and they were higher than I would like (around 130). I was really confused, until I started really looking at the nutrition information for what I ate yesterday. First, the Sugar Free Lifesavers are NOT zero carb - arrghhh. There are sugar free candy that is, so I'll have to go get some. The other "Interesting" one was the soup at lunch. When you buy canned soup, Campbell's Tomato is one of the lower carb soups out there. At the company cafeteria, it turns out NOT to be the case, in fact, the other 2 options (Italian Wedding and Chicken Noodle) have about 2/3rd the carbs as the "Old fashioned Tomato" Who'd have guessed?

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Been a while

Been a while since I blogged, and a LOT has gone on. Besides the usual Holiday stuff in Decemeber, I just wasn't feeling right.

On Jan 6th, I woke up with HORRID abdominal pain - I mean BAD. I had my wife take me to the emergency rooom at North Shore LIJ Manhasset. I was admitted to the hospital with acute pancreatitis. I was there until Jan 20th (aka 2 weeks).

It seems that this was caused by an extremely high triglyceride level (14000 - yes that is the right number of zeros)

While I was in the hospital, they also discovered that I am a Type II diabetic. They DID manage to get rid of the infection in my leg wound, and I'd say it's about 70% healed now.

About 1-2 weeks after I got home, I started physical therapy, as I was extremely weak. That went very well, and I "graduated" on March 16th, in other words, when they did my reevaluation, I was too well to continue.

I finally got back to work on March 18th (yes, I was out 10 weeks)

When I got back to work, I joined the Reebok Gym across the street from work. So far I really like the place. I met with my personal trainer Spencer yesterday, and we setup a good routine. Today was the first weekday I missed going to the gym because my leg wound (remember that other 30%) was really aching. I may try to go at lunch.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Project Valour-IT

Guys (and Gals)
What I think is one of the BEST charities out there is a group called "Project Valour-IT". They supply voice activated laptops to wounded service members (any service) - They are related to Soldiers Angels. Please give - and in the spirt of froendly competition, you can give with credit going to "your team"

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

APRS-SCS

Last week, the developer of APRS-SCS, John - KB2SCS announced that he was dropping all support for APRS-SCS, as it is written in VB6, which is no longer supported by "the boys from Redmond", aka Microsoft. At that time, John put the source code up on his Web Site.

I started to talk with John (he lives close by, and I really have to get together with him), and I think I'm going to take a crack at porting the program over to VB.NET.

This is NOT going to be a trivial port, and in fact, I've had a bear just getting the development environment up to the point I can compile the existing source (I'm there now - if you need hints, email me)

Anyway, John as agreed that I can "open source" the program.

I'm thinking that I'll put this up on Sourceforge (gasp - a windows app on Sourceforge!), and anyone who wants to contribute can.

The first issues that MUST be taken care of

1)The application uses what are called "old controls". These are .OCXs that Microsoft shipped with VB4 and 5, that were basically replaced by native controls in VB6, but were still available for download, but non supported. There is an "interesting" problem with the "Old controls" - they will not work in the VB6 development environment under Vista. (an aside, the VB6 IDE does not work in Vista64, but IS supported under Vista32)

2)The application uses a 3rd party OCX called "Socketwrench". There was a free version of this control, but there no longer is. Under .NET, we don't need it, the stream reader/writer classes can handle this for us

3)The VB6 and .NET graphics systems are totally different, and this will probably be the biggest part of the port

Anyway, I'd like to hear what you think, and many hands make light work. I'll need testers, reviewers, and even a few developers to help.

Anyone game?