Quiet Sunday

Just a short update. I have been a busy fellow these past weeks. Too much going on at work and life in general. Anyway, we took today off. It's my birthday! My wife and I went out to eat breakfast and did some shopping. Hung around the house and generally laid low. Sometimes it's nice to just "veg".

I went to a funeral last Friday for one of my coworkers. The gentleman was just 57 years old but had suffered with cancer for the past several years. He finally past on last Monday. The funeral was packed with family, friends and coworkers. It was standing room only at the funeral home. The priest said a short message which really struck home. He said that he looked at the death notice and saw, Born and a date, died and a date. In between was a hyphen (-). A person's whole life represented by a hyphen! This man had a great and full life and will be greatly missed. The priest challenged us to make our time here on earth full and rich to help those around us as this man did. Amen.

Eight Years

Today has been different for me. I have been thinking of that day eight years ago when America was attacked. I was driving into work and listening to the radio when they announced that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Comparisons were being made to the time when an airplane flew into the Empire State Building back in the 1940s. Suddenly the announce said that another plane had struck the WTC! I had arrived at work and walked into the building when one of the computer operators said, "They just bombed the Pentagon!". I rushed to my office and we all began to listen to the radios as the day unfolded.

The next big news was of the collapse of the first tower and then the second. We gathered around a TV and the images were awful. People running, smoke and dust hanging in the air. There were no words to describe how many of us felt.

In the next few days co-workers were working around the clock to help law enforcement officials with identification of the hijackers. They had obtained driver licenses with false IDs and members of our division gathered all the records together. This helped in the hunt for any accomplices or locations.

In the aftermath, I remember stories of people volunteering to travel to New York City to assist in the recovery and cleanup. People lined up to give blood. Others lined up to enlist into the military. Our country came together to help one another and make some kind of sense out of these horrible events. The events at the WTC, the Pentagon and the story of Flight 93 crashing in Pennsylvania became calls to action.

Since then, we have fought on many fronts in many different places at home and around the world. We continue to pray for our military and civilians who are in harms way to protect us at home. God protect and keep them safe and return them to us quickly!

Here is an amazing video tribute using Michael W. Smith's, "There She Stands."

Follow this link to a photo tribute set to Enya's, "Only Time":

New For Old

The old Pioneer

It is sadness I have to leave an old friend behind. My poor old (about 12 years old) Pioneer receiver/amplifier has decided it no longer wanted to receive or amplify. This unit gave our family many hours of quality entertainment from the radio to cassettes and now Cds and DVDs. All good things had to come to and end. Sigh! The amp would run a for about three to four minutes and then cut off. Click -- and you were watching a silent movie. Power it back on and then just a minute later, click again. (Kind of like the instructions on the shampoo bottle: Wash, rinse repeat). Power on, wait a few and click, silence.

After pulling the old girl (if amps have a gender, I would call this one a she) out of the shelf, I opened up the classy chassis and did a complete cleaning, vacuum, blowout and wipe down. She seemed to enjoy that and started working again, but it was not to last. About three weeks later, click!

I am sure an old-fashioned repair place (which doesn't exist anymore) would have the schematic diagram for the girl and quickly locate the offending part. A touch of the soldering iron and all would be well again. Like I wrote, those places don't exist anymore. I could probably do it myself being as I am somewhat of an electronics type. I just lack the schematic, oscilloscope, signal injector and parts.

The new Sony

So, onto the Internet(s) I went. Didn't need the 5.1 surround sound. I just like a clean stereo mix. Funding was limited so that kind of set the ceiling as to what I could search for. I finally found a Sony receiver/amplifier that fit the bill. Off to Best Buy and about two hours later we were back home (after minor side trips for other shopping and lunch).

The new unit sat on the floor for two days and so finally tonight, I made the change out. Power, speakers, inputs, outputs, antennas, oh my! About an hour later I pressed the power on button, did a reset and cranked up the volume. My old unit had a six set EQ and this only has Bass and Treble but that's OK. It's very clean and crisp sound. I can really make things shake if I want to but I would rather have great sound than just loud sound. The amp has .05% thd and that's not to shabby. While they say it's at 1 kHz they don't list the power output for the measurement. I figure it's about 5 or 10 watts, not the max of 200 watts this thing can put out.

I hope this one lasts as long as the first!

New Camera

So how do you take a picture of your new camera with your new camera? You don't. Just go to the web and grab an ad photo off of the vendor's site. So, here is the new camera. It's a refurbished Nikon Coolpix-L18. Magnolia Fly pointed us to the site where they were selling these at a great price so we placed our order for the red model. They were sold out and after about three weeks or so they offered us the blue one for the same price. We nailed it and a 4 GB memory card for less than $70.00! Now we have to learn how to use it. It takes good pix and videos. Mostly have been practicing on the cats. We will be uploading to the Flickr Pro account our daughter got for us as soon as we get some shots that need uploading...

Lookout world - we will taking some cool pix!

40 Years Ago

Apollo 11 lifts off, July 16, 1969

Today, July 16, 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 our first lunar landing mission. It was an amazing time in the history of our nation. We were finally going to achieve the goal set out by President Kennedy to send a man to the moon and return him safely before the end of the decade (the 1960s).

My dad worked at Kennedy Space Center for Federal Electric Corporation. This company provided communications support to the Space Center. Remember all the headsets and microphones that the launch control folks use to talk to one another and the astronauts? That communication device was one of the main things FEC was responsible for. They also did the video cameras at KSC, the radio gear in the rescue tanks, the count down clocks and a bunch of other stuff.

On launch day the highways and causeways around Titusville (were we lived) and Merritt Island were packed with tourists. Thousands upon thousands were gathered to watch the liftoff. We watched on TV at home. Right after the launch, I stepped out to our backyard and saw the Saturn flying upwards. I remember seeing it fly through a massive cloud and then burn a hole right out of the middle of it. Kind of made a doughnut out of it! We lived about 10 or 12 miles away from the launch pad (as the crow flies) but you could still clearly hear the rocket engines. The sound was so loud it rattled our garage door!

Four days later our family gathered around the TV and watched Neil Armstrong step foot onto the moon. It was an amazing time in our nation.

The crew of Apollo 11

Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin

Two years later I got to work at Kennedy Space Center as well. I was an electronics technician in the shops area and worked on the intercom systems for KSC. I got to see the end of the Apollo program and the start up of the Skylab project, America's first space station.

Skylab orbiting space lab.

It had problems but the crew was finally able to get the solar panels extended to provide power for the experiments. Launched May 14, 1973 and visited by three crews. On July 11, 1979, Skylab came back to earth. The debris field stretched from the Southeastern Indian Ocean across parts of Western Australia.

New (Old) Music

I really enjoy music. Good music is good music. We were down in Tampa visiting with my daughter, Katie, and son-in-law, Stephen, over the fourth of July. While riding around in Katie's car, I got to hear Imogen Heap's CD, "Speak For Yourself". I really enjoyed this CD. The vocalizations were amazing. She is a solo artist that uses electronics, synths, chorus, delay, echo and on and on. Her voice is so clear and pure and it was a joy to listen to her.

Well, as we were leaving town on Sunday morning, Katie came over and gave me the CD. It was so great. I have been listening to this for a few days now. I took it to work and have been playing it as background music while doing my computer duties and several coworkers have asked about it.

OK, so if you don't know about her, here is a video of a live performance. The album mix is a little different, but this video version is good. Here is "Goodnight and Go" by Imogen Heap



I found the music video of the album cut but it doesn't have embedding enabled.
Here is the link to the youtube music video version from the album

Yea, I will probably hit Amazon.com for some of her other albums.
Katie, you got me hooked!

Early Father's Day Gift

Barbara and I spent a Saturday pressure washing off our back deck. The "yuck" had built up and it was time to come clean. Well, while I was washing the deck, I decided it would be a good time to wash out my Weber Gas grill. I find that a good pressure washing is just what is needed to blow off all the grime, grease and stuff. Well, this time, it also blew out the bottom catch tray. That poor grill was about 12 years old and it was time for a replacement.

We went on line and checked around around to see what was available. Home Depot had the three burner Weber on sale and so we jumped in the truck and picked one up. Had to get a new gas tank as well because the tank fittings had changed since we bought the old one. It took about two hours to fit Tab 'A' into Slot 'B' and tighten screw 'C'. We were ready to cook with gas!

We have already had three meals on this awesome cooker! I have to be careful as the heat is really intense. I have got to watch the temps on the food or everything becomes "char-grilled". We cooked Mojo Chicken this past Sunday. Barbara marinated the chicken in Mojo sauce. It tasted great. We also grilled whole Vidalia onions with some butter, salt and pepper and a little Tuscan seasoning. They were so tender and sweet!

We are calling this my early Father's Day gift. I really enjoy it!