Mmmmmm food!

Check out the food!

Tom Bigelow Chicken Wing Gigelo

Tom seducing a chicken wing at Carmine's. And yes, they're that good.

Mmmmmm food!

Check out the food!

Dinner at Carmine's

While home for Spring Break, Banks, Biggs, Kirby and I went in to the city for dinner at Carmine's. It's quite swanky.

Sign fail!

Just leaving the Chinese buffet and I saw their sign. It's a little screwy....

Friends visiting, old crap, and fixing stuff!

Well, after my next class today (12pm to 1pm) I am going to the lab to burn some time then aronud 2-2:30ish my friends Tom and Tom and my girlfriend Di will be here to visit me for the weekend as a late birthday celebration. We're going out to dinner tomorrow night, and otherwise just hanging out all weekend. Probably going to give my camera a workout, watch out for that later.

In other news, some careful dumpster diving netted me a free HP 3466A Digital Multimeter. It's dead, and after some disassembly and troubleshooting with assistance from John (K1JR) and Greg Linder (KC9OPU) I've determined someone apparently destroyed the resistance sensing circuitry (there's a damn scorch mark!) and that took the power supply with it. However the repairs look pretty minor and as far as it goes it'll cost me about $7 in parts at worst, and for that I get a nice, second, benchtop multimeter. I need to look at getting some more leads for this thing if I fix it. I'll post up pictures of the meter and the damage later. Otherwise we also found one of those Radar-gun speed displays they put on the highways to scare you in to slowing down. Similar damage, the main regulator is toast, so John took that one home to fix, who knows what we'll do with that.

People throw out the coolest crap, and I think I'm starting to not suck at fixing random stuff, and it's definitely a lot of fun!

Hey look it's me

It's been crazy crazy busy lately, sorry about not posting.

Lately I've been doing lots of stuff. I'm working on a project to build a logic analyzer and waveform generator for testing digital circuits, I've gotten my bench supply near full functionality, and I went to a ham radio convention for the first time ever. That was today (okay technically yesterday) and here's the details on that event:

So at 4:30am I wake up, with almost no sleep, but I'm excited so it's alright, and I get ready to go. By 5am, I am outside Cheel waiting for Greg, starting to realize I can't feel anything, hanging out with Sam Rose (KC2LRC) and Chris (I forget his name and he doesn't have his call yet, he got licensed at the convention). It was cold. Really. Fricking. Cold. Greg took a while cause he was dealing with damage to his car, but it was short lived before he and John arrived and the two car convoy was put in to motion. Then began the problems :). Our plan was to have Greg navigate with his GPS/APRS system running, feeding his laptop with mapping software. Unfortunately the fuse to his secondary 12V power bus was blown, and unreplaceable at the time, so that killed that. We ended up having to give the GPS over to John to use with his Samsung Q1 minicomputer. That worked, or so we thought. We got a route mapped out and started on our way. The entire trip we had the radio's transmitting on two different frequencies so we could listen and talk at the same time. With full duplex up the two cars were in constant communication, which was a lot of fun (especially when passing and such ;) ) (On another note, is that syntax correct for the smiley? Please see: http://www.xkcd.com/541/ ). Due to a navigation error, we ended up taking the ferry despite not wanting to spend the money. But it was interesting, we had a game of radio trivia while waiting on the boat, and then there were some nice photo opportunities during the ride. Once off the boat we realized it had saved us a decent chunk of time so we were less cranky about the ferry.

A bunch of fun so far and we're not even there yet...

The convention was a lot of fun, the vendors were fun to talk to, the W1V broadcast station was fun to ogle, and even though it was small I was entertained much of the time by amusing stories and technical (read: geeky) discussions with the other convention goers. I bought myself a Freeduino kit and some breadboards, and the vendor seemed to like me cause he gave me a discount too, not much, but it was nice. We also grabbed some parts for the repeater relay project (I'll document that soon I promise). Overall it was nice. We had lunch at Friendly's which was nice, and not pricey or anything, which is even better. I also took a decent bunch of photos on the trip, which I'll link to at the bottom of the post. I pretty much passed out for the ride home though. Thanks to that powernap, plus another after getting back, I'm now stuck up late at night again... oops.

Oh well, here are the photos.

-KC2RGZ