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Here are videos taken from our July 25th Daly Mansion gig. The canopy of trees overhead does not reflect and focus our sound like a real bandshell, but it came out fine… probably better live than with a compact camera on video mode. I, on the other hand, never get past the back row while we are playing. Thus this is as close as I can come to hearing our music from the front and thank my wife for shooting us. 😉 – – – – – – The musicians involved fondly call this “The summer sight-reading program”. We practice a generous fistfull of charts on Tuesday, then play them later in the week for an audience. Next week we […]
There are a few opportunities left to catch this band before they close down for the winter … okay, more accurately, the non-summer season. We play while public schools are not in session. That is because a significant number of our musicians as well as the director are music teachers during the school year. Thus we only run our “summer sight reading program” during the non-school period. Everybody is welcome. Thus the skill levels vary a bit, but I happened in front of the band while it was practicing Tuesday and it sounded sharp! In the trombone section at the back of the band I rarely get the big picture. But it is good. The reviews are good. The price […]
Years before I entered high school, my dad began teaching me the game he LOVED and excelled at. I entered a high school of 3,000 baby boomers (and graduated) as a distinctly small boy of 5’2″, 98 pounds, but was the 3rd best tennis player on the team all three of my high school years. I was the only one who could beat the coach because the better players followed the muscle-bound pin-head’s instructions while I was not so predictable. Tennis is a fast-paced, thinking, strategy game with an athletic skill set thrown in. I enjoyed the game then, but only found tennis partners once or twice after that. The last five years has found me teaching quite a few […]
AmmoToGo.com published the results of an excellent, thorough and hugely informative defensive handgun ammunition test. I have never seen one better; rarely one even close. Quite noteworthy is that a bullet design may be excellent in one caliber but perform poorly in another. Velocity is an interesting factor, but penetration and expanded diameter are more important. Anybody with a chronograph can give you the former. It is normally listed on the box and in promotional literature. Only shooting into ballistic gel provides the latter. The best test fires bullets through simulated winter clothes into ballistic gel. AmmoToGo.co did exactly that with this test. In addition to their great knowledge base, they include good prices on ammunition you can order […]
Amateur radio call signs, also known as station identification, are issued by the FCC to all amateur radio stations much like commercial broadcasters. There is a specialized protocol and pattern for the stations. The first license issued to an amateur has two alpha characters, their region number 0 through 9 followed by another three alphas. They come out sequentially as each new license is issued. Once licensed, operators can submit requests for a call sign change (aka: vanity call sign). The pattern is specific which limits creativity as well as selection. Achieving the highest license level (Amateur Extra) allows for a shorter call sign though still very specific and limited in number/letter pattern. In honor of getting there, I submitted […]
July 6, 2019 – Darby, Montana Six of us came to my Bunkhouse Road workshop from SE Darby hills, Hamilton and Alberton canyons – Technicians, Generals, Amateur Extras Some white-board work explaining the math in metric and inches Our calculations were primarily done in metric (Ted’s slide rule prefers it) 300,000,000 meters per second / 147,000,000 Hz = 2.04 meters = 204 cm a quarter wave antenna will be about 50 cm long, as will each radial Measurements were done with metric + inch tape measure Hardware: dual binding post to BNC connector BNC to SO-239 Adapter choices of light and heavy electric fence wire electric fence insulators home-made pvc pipe insulators Poly-pipe Tees and drip irrigation pipe for radial […]
Renaming it “4th of July” is not merely laziness. Of course it is the 4th on your calendar, but it is a celebration representing some brave fighters’ Declaration of Independence from a powerful parasitic class of people who had demonstrated a monopoly on violence and oppression. They won a round. The ruling elite had to reorganize. It took a hundred years and another major military war that the freedom fighters lost… not by much, mind you, but they did lose. I just ask you today to spend a little time thinking about independence from oppression, the risks those rebels took and the benefits they won for many subsequent generations. Consider also who is threatened by such thinking and why their […]
I have been a weather watcher since I began working outdoors a lot about 35 years ago. It was also around then I studied meteorology in college. Nowadays we have much better tools readily accessable to anybody. We also have geoengineers working the weather over on a massive, global scale. One of my favorite tools is geostationary satellite GOES 17. Geostationary means it stays in a fixed position relative to our planet. I check this daily. It is, in fact, my home page. Learn to read it and The Weather Underground regional infrared satellite image and you can predict your weather more accurately than the computer models that do not allow for geoengineering. I produced the following videos to help […]
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