Nuthatch

There's a little nuthatch that keeps visiting the pine tree in my front yard for some of the many bird and squirrel goodies mother sets out for them. I managed to shoot a few pictures when it would stay still long enough, so here they are for your enjoyment.

Fig. 1: Closeup at 300mm, f5.6 @ 1/125.

Fig. 2: Closeup at 300mm, f5.6 @ 1/320.

Fig. 3: Closeup at 300mm, f5.6 @ 1/125.

I was able to get rather close to this beautiful little creature, but what you see is actually an illusion. It helps to have a decent high-megapixel camera and a long lens. The pictures, above, were taken with a Sony alpha 200, 10.2 megapixels in JPEG mode, with a Minolta Maxxum autofocus 75-300mm lens at 300mm. I then cropped them from there and did some color and contrast adjustments using Google's Picasa 3 software.

Power Outage

September is usually uneventful here in Ohio...as is pretty much every month. However, September of 2008 will go down in infamy as being the windiest on record. On Sunday, September 14, the remains of Hurricane Ike blew through our area and knocked out power to about 330,000 people in the Dayton area. In other words, everybody.

I have never, ever heard the wind howl like this. Ever. And it wasn't just one strong gust every now and then. I'm talking a constant wind of nearly 50 miles per hour, even gusting as high as 75. This went on for hours. The wind started about 10am that day, we lost power at 1pm and it finally stopped howling at about 6pm.

Thankfully, my house was spared any wind damage, save for my big satellite dish which was blown out of alignment. Mother and father's house was similarly undamaged.

Fig. 1: Misaligned Satellite Dish.

It is not that big of a deal because it wouldn't align properly where it was anyhow so I moved it back to the bird feeder post nearer the ground.

Lots of trees suffered in the storm, which was the major cause of the power outages.

Fig. 2: Tree limbs in my neighbor's yard.

The trees belonging to my backyard neighbor were the hardest hit. The wind stripped the tree nearly bare and tore off a number of limbs.

Fig. 3: A limb in my parent's backyard.

We were without power for nearly seven (7!) days. Most of the line crews from around here had been dispatched to the ravaged areas of Texas after the hurricane proper took out electric down there. No one expected such a savage windstorm to come through our area.

Fig. 4: The view between my parent's
house (left) and mine (right).

We didn't expect the power to be out for so long. Thankfully, we had some rather cool days after the storm blew through, so I left the windows open. Sleeping with the windows open all night was actually pretty terrific!

At the second day I had to clean out my fridge and freezer.

Fig. 5: My empty fridge.

All I had left was some mustard, pickles, microwave popcorn, bottled water, film, batteries and my stash of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I threw out some mayonnaise, frozen chicken pot pies, mini pizzas and hot pockets. Hey, I'm a bachelor...you expect me to have actual food? I used this time to actually do a good clean on the fridge, too, which was convenient.

Mother and father were hit harder in this regard. They ended up throwing out two new gallons of milk, lots of new frozen stuff, lunchmeat and bacon and more. They had just gone to the store that Saturday! Needless to say, we ate out nearly every night. Well, at the restaurants that had power. Most of the nearby joints were without power for the duration, too.

The phone company had set up a number of generators and power trucks at their central offices and tandems to keep the phone lines powered. There were so many traffic signals without power that the city did not have enough portable stop signs to go around. Luckily, people were doing right and treating them as four-way stops like they should.

I think I dealt with the situation pretty well. I didn't have internet, which was driving me crazy, but I took it in stride. I would take my iPod, laptop and cell phone to work to charge them and when I got home I would play solitaire or pinball until my battery died, then I would listen to music or watch videos on my iPod until time for bed. I had to use my cell phone as an alarm clock so I could get up on time. Taking showers by flashlight really isn't much different. At least I had hot water...behold the power and glory of natural gas!

Fig. 6: My house, before and after the power outage.

Fig. 7: My house, during the power outage.

Mother, however, was a different story. I thought that she was going to have a breakdown. I'm serious, she was getting worse every day; getting closer to that edge that once you cross you can never come back. She was getting mad at me because I was dealing with the situation in a calm, cool manner as if it was no big deal. She was unusually salty at work and would severely admonish people who called in because they had no power.

I saw no reason to get all worked up. Sure it was annoying and I would rather it not happen, but it did, so there. She did not see it that way. By day three, she was ready to do violence to anyone from the power company. By day five, she was ready to kill for a generator. More than once she was near tears. I can't say as I blame her, she is sensitive and when out of her comfortable element she doesn't know how to react. Afterward she said that she was not good in a personal crisis. She's right.

I will miss you, dearest Beverly...

I was planning on putting up a posting tonight about the hurricane and power outages here in Ohio, and some musings about some of the stupidity and interesting things that went on during the extended blackout. I swear I had it all ready in my head, complete with pictures!

That, of course, was in a perfect world where I could come home from an extremely annoying day at work and vegetate. This, alas, was not to be.

Mother called me over to her house tonight, as per usual. However, when I arrived, she started crying. This is a prime indicator of something extremely bad. And, well, it is. My mother's dearest best friend, Beverly, passed away suddenly last night. It may have been a stroke or a heart attack, no one if for sure yet. She was 50. Mother worked with her at the nursing home. Mother is the personnel director and Beverly was the Director of Nursing.

It was only a few months ago that we attended a surprise birthday party for her 50th. In more recent memories, she came over numerous times this summer to swim in mum and dad's pool and shoot the breeze.

I remember clearly the last time I saw her was this last Friday. I went to the nursing home to work on a faulty computer and she stopped to visit with me for a while. I was whining to her about how I still had no power and how mother was getting pretty close to her wit's end being in the same situation. She gave me a back rub. A good one. She gave great backrubs.

Beverly will forever be close to my heart for helping me deal with having cancer, since she had gone through chemo and radiation herself. She was also integral in helping my mother cope with my treatments and what understanding what I was going through. She was a great friend to mummy as well.

Going to the nursing home will not be the same without seeing her there, ransacking her office for candy, a backrub and the inevitable two-way street of venting about life, the universe and everything. I will miss her very much, as will a lot of people.

Hurricane Ike

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

The bits and pieces of Hurricane Ike blew through the Dayton area on Sunday afternoon knocking out power and throwing full-grown trees around like matchsticks. There were wind gusts of up to 75 mph throughout the area and this went on for hours and hours. About 225,000 people are still without power.

I have been powerless since Sunday at 1pm EDT. Other than that, I have come through unscathed. My house in fine, no damage to any of my trees. Mother and father's house, next door, is undamaged as well. There are, though, vast quantities of leaves in both our yards.

I have a few pictures which I will post as soon as power comes back on. They say it may be the weekend before that happens, though.

My relatively boring life has just increased its boredom factor by 10x. I've been turning in early every night. Sleeping with the windows open has been quite refreshing; thankfully the weather has been really nice and the evenings unusually cool.

No one in Ohio expects a hurricane.

Another One Bites the Dust

Fig. 1: The remains of Mailbox No. 2

When I moved in to my little house, one of the first things I did was replace the mailbox. The mailbox that was here was kinda funky and falling apart, so I decided to get a new one to start my house on its way to a non-amateur-pharmacy identity.

The post you see in figure 1, above, I purchased for it and bought a heavy duty mailbox made out of thick steel. I painted it in green and put it up and had many a month of mail deliveries in it. That is until a nice, older gentleman driving with his wife turned the corner a bit to shallow and struck the edge with the passenger side mirror.

The guy stopped and was quite woeful of my mailbox. The leading edge was bent such that the door would not open. He wanted to pay for it, but I told him to put that money towards a new mirror on his minivan, that I could bend out the damage on the mailbox with a plier and that it was no big deal. I was more impressed...well, shocked, really...that the gentleman even stopped. Where are classy people like that now-a-days? What followed was many more months of trouble-free postal mail.

As winter came and went, it started to get harder and harder to keep the mailbox closed. The piano-style hinge holding the door was beginning to rust, as were the welds holding the top to the bottom, and the area the I bent out to get the door to open and close. I decided to take action this spring. I bought a new mailbox, the one you see in figure 1, above, to replace it. This one was a bit flimsier, but bigger and painted in a nice shade of brown that would compliment my home.

That is until someone knocked it down in the night this last Friday night/Saturday morning. The results are what you see, above. Just what I needed.

So, I went to the local DIY store and bought a new post and mailbox and some nice numbers. This time I painted the box and numbers the same shade as I did my front storm door, a flat, textured forest green. I think it turned out pretty well. It was certainly a better paint job than the original mailbox, which I painted with a "hammered" finish bright green...and did a terrible job on it.

Fig. 2: The new mailbox, No. 3

The new mailbox makes the third mailbox I have had in as many years. I only hope that the bastard's car looks as bad as mailbox number 2.

Another Pointless Victory

Fig. 1: Screen capture of my record Solitaire score.

I play Solitaire way too much. It is pretty much a mindless game that can be easily worked in while waiting for something, to alleviate boredom or whatever. It is an interesting game because each deal results in a different combination of luck and skill required to complete the game. A lot of the time it works out that you can't place any of the cards you flip, like the one that I played right before the one shown, above.

In the one shown above, I got a bonus of 8,022 for completing the game in 84 seconds (the fastest I've ever played) for a total score of 9,029. This is the highest score I have ever achieved, handily beating my previous record being 8,222 in 93 seconds on Tuesday, August 26, 2008.

Just to be sure, the parameters of the game are standard scoring, three-card flip, and I right-click to move valid cards to the upper-right completion piles. I do not use the SHIFT-CTRL-ALT cheat, because that is cheating!

The "Griefer" Experience

The always lovely Orchid, in her blog entry titled Griefers, related experiences about how many people seem to get a charge out of causing pain, anguish and difficulty to others. This was in the context of an online game that her husband was playing.

This type of behavior seems to happen a lot in the online world. Unfortunately, some circumstances can cause it to get out of hand quickly, especially if those involved are in a relatively short distance of one another in the real world...and they have an easy way to find out where you are.

I have been a licensed amateur radio operator for quite some time now, relatively speaking. I was first licensed in 2000. A friend of mine, "GL", also got licensed at the time I did. One day I got a bug up my bum that I was going to finally test and get licensed. I thought that ham radio, as it is often called, would be an amusing hobby to pursue. (Albeit a very expensive one!)

For a number of years prior I did quite a bit of research on what was required to take the exam, where they were given, as well as what was going on in the local ham radio scene. I was aware of the number of radio clubs in the local area and which ones were the "good old boy" clubs filled with holier-than-thou thinking and douchebagguery. Because of this, I was not really thrilled about the prospects of meeting new people in this hobby but I thought that they could not all be bad.

To this end, I decided that it would be in my best interest to take the test far outside the local area, so I found a testing session in Columbus, some 70 miles away. This way I would be nearly guaranteed to not interface with anyone from the local crowd that might cause issues in the future. So, one Saturday morning, "GL" and I went east and took the test and passed.

Afterward, we had to wait for about two weeks to get the official paper license and our call signs before we could actually start talking on the radio. To pass the time we became active on IRC in some of the local radio chatrooms to see who was around and what they were up to. It was in here that I met a good friend "B", who had been licensed since the dawn of time. She, "GL" and I would talk often, usually about nothing in particular. Also in the chat rooms were a number of douchebags that were affiliated with some of the aforementioned clubs.

In ham radio, one of the things clubs often have is what is called a repeater. This is a radio who's sole purpose is to take incoming transmissions on one frequency and retransmit that over another frequency with significantly higher power. This is so users of small, handheld radios with low power can talk far and wide while still maintaining low power. This is quite useful, and will end up as a radio-based party line, if you will, where people over a large area can congregate and talk about nothing in particular. This, at least, is the way it is supposed to work. (More on this coming up...)

One of the clubs was having problems with its repeater. There was intermittent interference which they thought was being caused by someone. Jammers, as they are called, are an unfortunately common problem.

In the chat room, the douchebags were talking about the jammer when "GL" came in and joined the conversation. I do not remember what he said, since I was not there, but he made some innocent remark that the other people in the room, except for "B" took exception to. This, then, escalated into those people thinking that he was the source of the jamming. "B" took exception to this and started to defend "GL" and myself. Why was I all of the sudden involved? Because those in the room knew that "GL" and I were friends, and our call signs were one character different! I wasn't always around, so I must be lurking around jamming their repeater. (Never mind that I was working full time and had a part time job.)

This turned from online IRC chat into phone calls from the "leaders" of the club to "B". She was once affiliated with said club except she decided that the general attitude of the members, the embezzling and crookedness was too much to handle, so she left the club about 15 years prior. (She launched an investigation into an accouting scandal that caused a lot of aguish amongst the officers of the club that were embezzling funds.)

After essentially proving that myself and "GL" were indeed two separate people, and that neither of us had the need or desire to cause interference to the club's repeater, "B" told those in the chat room that were causing us problems to lay off or they would answer to her personally. One of the people was an ex-acquaintance of hers that tried to swindle her farm out from under her and hit her on one occasion.

"GL" offered to help track down the interference. So, one evening when the jamming was really bad, he and several others set out to find the problem. After hours of hunting they finally converged on an address in Enon, Ohio, not far from where I live. They traced it to an apartment in a block of flats. Much to the dismay of one of the people that caused "GL" and I grief on the air and in the chat room, it was found to be where they lived. It was discovered that there was an intermittent short in the microphone to the radio and that would cause the radio to transmit dead air when a nearby fan would blow on it. Talk about just desserts.

After finding out from the FCC's online records where "GL" lived, some of the members of the club actually went to his house and knocked over an antenna on his property. No one ever did anything to me, thankfully.

This series of incidents showed me that even something as interesting as ham radio, which is supposed to be the epitome of camaraderie and "help in the times of disaster" is not free of "griefers" and douchebagguery. It was this series of incidents, too, that nearly caused me to turn my license back into the FCC.

It was "B", though, that caused me to not do that. With her help, we overcame the trouble that the griefers started and we now are involved in the same small club, with our own repeater. The club that the griefers were affiliated with is no more and most of the irritants have faded into the distance.

Some clubs don't like for people to talk on their repeater. When you do talk, you are admonished if you make idle chit chat and not give weather and signal reports or talk about club business and functions. This is the exact opposite of one of the main ideals of our club. Anyone that wants to come on and talk on our repeater is free to do so, member or not. What is the point of having a repeater if all you can do is give a weather report? Just look outside! Ham radio is supposed to be about friendship, camaraderie and courtesy. Chit-chatting and having a good time is part of that, helping in emergencies and being available and prepared to disasters is another. Causing problems and hurting people is not.