2007 CQ WW DX SSB Contest

Well, I worked my very first CQ WW DX SSB Contest over the past weekend. I set
a goal for 500 contacts for myself. The goal was set before I realized that
the stations were going to be all from other countries, nothing stateside. The
stateside contacts didn't count for any points, just other countries and other
zones. I had a good time overall with 20:18:33 total operating time. That
includes tuning around and trying to work stations. I was originaly going to
pick a frequency on each band and call CQ Contest but that didn't work out to
well because there were not many stateside contacts as I mentioned. The
Contest was for 160M, 80M, 40M, 20M, 15M, and 10M. I have no 160 or 80 antenna
here so I was limited to only 4 bands. Station was a 746Pro Icom running 100
Watts. Antenna was a G5RV-JR, 52 foot long 40-10 Dipole up at 15 feet high.
Stats are as followed:

40 Meter = 48 Contacts, 22 Countries, and 14 Zones.
20 Meter = 65 Contacts, 31 Countries, and 15 Zones.
15 Meter = 27 Contacts, 19 Countries, and 9 Zones.
10 Meter = 13 Contacts, 10 Countries, and 7 Zones.

153 Total Contacts, 310 QSO Points, 127 Multipliers for a total score of 39370.

Not too bad for my modest setup. It was awesome to see 10 meters open into
south america and the caribbean. I was hoping to work Barbados on 10 but no
joy. I did however work Barbados on 40 and 20. 8P5A on 40 and 20 and 8P6SH on
40. I had a good time. Not as many contacts as field day but quality DX
contacts.

I won money! (for real this time)

I am slow to upate this, sorry. About 3 weeks ago I was at work when I got a call from Ray. He said that one of our clients sons ran into our office and said that I won money on 94.7 WCSX www.wcsx.com I was skeptical at first. Anyway, I called and was added to the workforce. You get added to the workforce and every hour they call a name, you make 100 dollars right off the bat and if the next person they call doesn't call back then you keep winning 100 dollars an hour. I wound up winning 400 dollars! I was pretty pumped! Me and Piper and Andrew went down to the studio to pick up the cash a few days later.. It was awesome! We got to go back into the studio and they recorded a promo with Andrew saying "My dad won 400 dollars on 94.7 WCSX". It really helped out with the bills. :)

Ghost in the machine = DEMON

Well, the Acer Notebook crapped out... It is En Route to Texas for warranty repair as I write this. I am glad that it crapped out while it was still under warranty though. I have this IBM thinkpad that I am using now but I do have the choice of 5 computers in the house to use. Hey, Glen, what was that about Acer being owned by NEC now and the quality. :) Oh well.

WOW!! A HERO!!

This is amazing. This is a 60 year old guy who lives on lake Erie in Ohio. He sees a Plane crash into the lake and his first thought? Grab a rowboat and start going towards it to help. What an amazing guy! Most people would just call 911 and say to themselves "Man everybody is dead" or "Let the professionals handle it" This guy saved the life of a 7 year old kid because of his actions. It is refreshing to see something positive in the news for once. It is too bad the kid lost his brother and dad in the crash. I almost started crying when I saw this story. If I was in that situation, I would do the same thing. I am the kind of person that doesn't think of the consequences in an emergency situation, I just act. Amazing! This guy should get something for his effort. Watch the video for yourself and tell me that this guy is not awesome. WOW! I just can't believe this. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/09/04/oh.plane.into.lake.erie.wews

BBS back up and running

The BBS (Bulletin Board System) is back up and running after being down for about a month and a half. It was moved from an EMachines crap computer (The motherboard fried) to an IBM eServer. The eServer is pretty cool and I have 3 - 40GB Hard drives in it and 512 MB ram, the processor is a Celeron 2GHZ (Which is more than enough to host my BBS. If you want to check it out and remember the good old days, download and install this program http://www.theroughnecks.net/download/mTelnet-1.0b12-Setup.exe After you install that (make sure you don't uncheck any of the boxes during setup) go here to log on and enjoy the BBS telnet://scannerbbs.dyndns.org

Ghost In The Machine

I have been having some computer problems here. For one, my AMD Turion 64 notebook's USB ports stopped working. This happened about 4 days ago. I devoted much of yesterday to try and fix it. I searched and searched online for about 2 hours looking for people with similar problems. They were all XP related.. Nothing reported in Vista since that is what operating system my notebook runs on (Blech!). I fiddled with it for a good 4 hours total before just finally giving up. This really sucks too because I hate the touchpad mouse and had a wireless laser mouse hooked up. This also meant I had to Install Itunes on a different computer and all that too. I had a dream last night that I plugged in my mouse and it worked so I work up this morning, plugged it in and HA HA! It works. All the ports work now and so does my Ipod. Weird, I guess I had a premonition about it. I also had a dream that I was doin' 2 chicks in a big hot tub. :-) Anyway, maybe something I did yesterday fixed it, or maybe it was my dream. At any rate, Windows Vista is know for weird intermittent problems. I have seen more weird stuff going on with Vista than anything else. I am just glad that it works now, and hopefully doesn't happen again.

Klaus revisited

Awhile ago, Glen sent me a video about a German man named Klaus. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. I have long since then lost the video and haven't seen it around for a long time. Ray found it on YouTube recently. Here it is, enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r5gZnx4y0c

My Space is stupid and it sucks and is dumb and not cool.

I like writing and reading blogs. However, It sucks when everyone I know (Glen excluded, I don't think he has a My Space page) has a My Space page and you can't look at their pics or read their blogs because you don't have a My Space page. I caved and created one just for the fact that I would like to do those fore mentioned things. Don't expect anything flashy from it though. I spent 3 min on it and it is going to stay that way. If you are still curious, here it is: http://myspace.com/w8zzu

I look like people?

I was at work yesterday setting up a hospital bed. The daughter of the person I was setting up the bed for said "You look like Tony Stewart". I said "Who is Tony Stewart". She said "He is a nascar driver, he drives the number 20 Home Depot car". That is why I didn't know who he was, I don't follow nascar. So, I said "Is he good looking or ugly?" and she said "He is real good looking". At that point, I was wondering if she was hitting on me or what. Sometimes I am a little slow with things like that.. Anyway, I decided to look up this Tony Stewart. Below is a Pic of me and a pic of Tony Stewart. Hint - I am shooting the shotgun.

You be the judge. I was told awhile ago that I also look like Justin Leonard. He is a golfer. Here is a Pic of him:

I think I look more like Justin Leonard than Tony Stewart. Maybe it is just the sunglasses? Oh well, if you go back far enough, we are all related anyway. :-)

Drunk Driving Ads

I was watching TV last night, Independence Day to be exact (I haven't seen the movie in awhile and watching Jeff Goldblum is like watching a train wreck), anyway, I saw one of those ads for drunk driving. The ad goes on and on about how "If you had 1 too many drinks" you shouldn't drive, or "If you are over the legal limit" you shouldn't drive. How about an ad that says that you shouldn't drive if you have had anything to drink. It seems to me that the ads are saying that it is ok to drink as long as you don't have one too many. That is pretty messed up. Most people when they start drinking don't realize when the are over the limit. Shit, I have had like 6 beers before and have felt fine to drive. Does that mean - If I feel like I am not drunk, then I am not drunk driving? I think they need to re-think their ad campaign to promote not driving at all, even when you have had one drink. Bars are stupid anyway. They are over priced and meat markets. Oh well.. Just my thoughts on this subject.

I haven't posted in a loooong time...

Wow! March 25th was the last entry.. Well, I have some time almost every moring now to post since Piper got promoted to manager at work. I have to be up at 6am mon-fri now so I have about an extra hour each morning while I sit here at work. Look for more posts.

WAHOO, We won the Lottery.... DOH!

So, I am standing behind my work smoking on thursday thinking "man, I wish we had more money" when I looked down at my feet and spotted a lottery ticket. Oh, whats this? an Ohio lottery ticket. We live in Michigan (not too far from Ohio, about 50 miles) and strangely enough, I have never seen an Ohio lottery ticket. I inspected it while I smoked and noticed it had about 7 different drawings on it. It was raining and wet out that day so the ticket was soaked. I put it on the floor of my work van and ran the heat on low to dry it out. When the ticket dried out I inspected it some more. I noticed that the mega millions was played on the ticket along with a "kicker" number... to say the least, I was intrigued by this "kicker" number. I couldn't wait to get home and check this baby online. All the games on the ticket were for Wed, March 21st. I couldn't help thinking "this was a winner and someone dropped it". Anyway, I got home and showed Piper (my wife) and got on the computer to check it. The first thing I checked was this "kicker" number, and it matched!!!! HOLY COW, PIPER WE WON!!!! I looked at the prize - $100,000. Wow!!! Sugar Plum fairies were dancing in our heads! "We can pay off the bills" "We can take a vacation". So, I started looking at the rules and looking for a number to call so I could verify this. The rules were a little unclear as to how you actually win this "kicker". I was so hung up on this "kicker" that I didn't even check any of the other numbers. I called the 800 number for the Ohio lottery commission and got to a person. I explained to the person that the rules were a little unclear and I wasn't sure if I had won or not. The lady on the other end said "As long as the Kicker number matches, you've won". I hung up the phone and was pumped at this point, making plans to drive to Ohio to claim my prize. This had to be too good to be true so I called again. This time I gave the lady on the phone the serial numbers... "I am sorry sir, those are not valid" So I said, "well, maybe I read them wrong, I will give them to you again" This time as I was reading them back, I looked at the top of the ticket... "Winning Numbers For 3-21-07" and it hit me like a ton of bricks... This was just a printout of the winning numbers. I went back in and checked online with the other numbers... Sure enough, they were all matches.. I broke the news to Piper and we went from big pimps back to normal people in seconds flat. Oh well, at least now I know what it feels like.. :-(

Wendys 4 Alarm Chicken Sandwich = Burning Butthole

So I saw an ad on TV for Wendy's new spicy 4 alarm chicken sandwich. I had to have one. What makes it 4 alarm is that it is spicy chicken, spicy pepper jack cheese, spicy chipolte sauce, and jalapeno peppers. It didn't taste spicy while I was eating it. I guess it was a little spicy, nothing out of the ordinary however. It was not very good to say the least and it gave me the worst case of burning butthole I have ever had in my life. The question is, don't the taste testers tell the Wendy's corp. that they get severe burning butthole the next day. Is the burning butthole just implied because of the nature of whats in the sandwich? Whatever the case may be, I think I will give my bowels a rest for awhile.

Motivation

I have been motivated to redo my web page: http://www.qsl.net/kc8szu
I have not done any work on it in years and it needs a serious re-vamping. The new site URL is: http://home.comcast.net/~w8zzu I have added a link to the new site URL here on the blog page. Keep checking it frequently, I am going to be working on it slooooowly.

A Tale of 2 Rotten Brewed Drinks - Recipe For Diarrhea?

Rotten brewed drink #1 was yesterday when I was craving a Lipton Brisk iced tea with lemon. I stopped at a local gas station and picked one up along with A teriyaki beef jerky stick. I took a bite of the beef jerky and all was well. Next I took a drink of the Brisk and it tasted rotten. I wrote off this rotteness as just a weird teriyaki after taste making the Brisk taste weird. This sometimes happens when you mix 2 different tasting things, ie - Toothpaste and Orange juice. Needless to say I drank half the bottle before I realized how rotten it was and looked at the date.. 1-10-06 YES 2006 not 2007, thats 1 year and 2 months past the drink by date. Drink by dates on pop usually just make the pop lose carbonation, but on tea that is brewed, it's not cool, trust me. So today I was going by McDonalds and saw a sign for "New Iced Mocha Latte" . Little did I know that this was going to be Rotten brewed drink #2, the possible second and final ingredient in the recipe for exploding diarrhea. So, I went through the drive thru and saw the price, $2.97? Wow, this must be a good drink with chocolately goodness for that price, I'll take it. I knew something was wrong when I saw the lady at the drive thru holding the clear plastic cup and it had no ice in it, WTF? Now I am not a hardcore coffee drinker or anything but I like a good iced coffee every now and then. I have had my fair share of iced mocha's and everyone contained ice. They brew the coffee strong so as the ice melts it doesn't water it down. Anyway, back to the McDonalds version. I said to myself, no big deal on the ice it will just be stronger, at least it had whipped cream on it! I took a drink, YECH! Rotten tasting. I thought to my self at this point, "I will mix it around with my straw and stir the whipped cream in". I first tasted it with my finger to make sure it was ok and it tasted fine. The stirring made it taste even worse and warmed it up a bit so it wasn't even really "iced" anymore. Needless to say, I drank the whole thing for the caffiene content. 5 hours later, I was driving down the road and had the worst gas pains I ever had in my life. I knew I had to crap and do it NOW! Luckily I was only 2 miles from my house when this started. The bad part, the guy in front of me was like 80 years old and driving 10 MPH slower than the speed limit. I finally made it home, flew into the house, ran into the bathroom and had exploding diarrhea. All I remember is my wife saying "That bad huh?" as I was running by. I also remember her making farting noises outside the door of the bathroom, in which I yelled "Leave me alone, I don't feel good". So was it the Brisk that brewed in my stomach for a day that did it? or was it the Iced Mocha? or a combination of both? Whatever it was, I think the lesson is, If it tastes rotten, then it is, and don't drink it. Also, McDonalds needs to stick with greasy fries and burgers, not fancy coffee drinks.