Yum, Bacon

     "'Nitrates in bacon?'  Look, kid, when I was growin' up, we'd'a happily paid day rates if it would've got us bacon!"

Scissors Beats Paper

WW II: European theater outcome predicted in one composite image.

     ...Blogging this from bed.  Ears not working very well.  Geez.

Cold: Receding In The Taillights?

     I sure hope it's over.  My sinuses seem stable and my temperature not especially high -- or variable.  I'm kind of sore and weak but that's to be expected.

     This being May in Indianapolis, I'm heading in to work.  I'm probably not quite 100% but even a little will be more use than 0% and we don't have anyone to spare.

     (So, I write that and my temperature s-p-I-k-e-s.  Arrgh. Get thee behind me, O ironic Fates! And somebody fetch me a mirror so's I can keep an eye on them.)

     Yeah, it's doc-in-a-box for me. As soon as I feel up to the drive -- a wave of exhaustion came along with the spike and the pattern has been fever-chills-doze off, fever-chills-doze off over since.

"Local" Anti-Gunner Smells Astro-Turfy

     So, there's this "42-year-old stay-at-home Mom in Zionsville, IN," one "Shannon Watts" (if that is her real name) who is (supposedly) runnin' some Mommy gun-hater group, working for change so legally-armed people like me will be made not let the sun set on us anywhere in her world, especially at Starbucks, Cabela's (oh really?) or the Wal-Mart.

     The press release is datelined "Indianapolis," not especially fertile ground for anti-gunners; y'go to her "Contact" page and the phone numbers are all area code 404!  --That's Atlanta, Georgia.  So, hey, private boiler-room operation?  Mighty upscale for a nonworkin' Mom, even in a high-end, semi-artsy bedroom community.*

     I guess the ol' "Fine Arts" gig must pay really well.  On the other hand, it doesn't look to be as engaging for her as trying to take away other people's rights....

     See ya next April, dearie -- unless you take up yet another hobby in the meantime.

     ETA: The semi-amusing part is that for a lot of gun-haters, this is an essentially classist thing and they feel ever so much better about their first-class citizenship when they have (supposedly) second-class citizens like you and me to look down on -- all while serving as willing foot soldiers for the Bloombergs and Joyce Foundations of the world, who look down on them as readily-manipulated climbers. C'mon, surely you learned better in Civics class?  No? 
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* Zionsville is Beautiful Music to Broad Ripple's Rock'n'Roll.  One suspects their visual art would be similarly soothing and bland compared to the vibrant, raucous stuff down here in the trenches, but that'd be inverse snobbery or something.

Food

     Prolly not what The Conventional Wisdom would say I should be eating, but Tam brung me a burger from 20 Tap wit' toe-maters (eek!), onyum & lettuce on some kinda fancy-schamncy bun.  Add a little Gulden's and some chili sauce (we of Roseholme sneer at mere ketchup) and it's hittin' the spot most majorly.

     20 Tap is yet another of those Broad Ripple places with a chef-refugee from an El Humongeo outfit expressing his or her long pent-up desires for a menu of truly interesting and tasty food; even something as simple as burger gets extra attention.  Sure they have not a mere 20 but thirty-eight (38) craft beers on tap, but you need some pub grub that'll stand up to the excellence and theirs does.

     Heck, it even works for me, washin' it down with orange pop.

Fever = Drugs?

     Either running a fever is the same as having too much to drink or doing drugs, or there's a network of little low-power noncommercial FM stations in Hawaii that rents time on the brains of engineering-type people running a fever.

     I kept waking up last night saying things, with incredibly detailed memories of working on little transmitters in lush, difficult-to-access locations (and atop a few tall buildings).  "H'mm, transmitter won't stay on.  How's the VSWR?"*  or, "No.  Not that." and so on.

     Darned weird.

     Last night I never got as far as the bathtub.  My limbs felt so heavy I could hardly move and I was very chilly.  Crawled into bed and woke three hours later, burning up, perspiring.  Only slept an hour at a time after that, always nodding off while freeezin' and waking up hot.  And chatty.

     I'm up, I've had breakfast (simplest possible: eggs scrambled with bacon and rice) and I'm going back to bed.  And this time, Mr. Kamehameha, I am not workin' on your nickle-dime transmitters; you need to buy some new ones, made by reputable firms.  Crown or Nautel or somebody.
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* Pronounced "VIZ-WHAR," it's a measurement of the matching between a transmitter and antenna (etc.).  The letters stand for "Voltage Standing-Wave Ratio," harkening back to a distant past in which VHF transmitter output was measured in RF Volts across a known load impedance instead of just drawing the meter scale to show the power in Watts, a very simple bit of basic algebra: voltage squared divided by resistance.  Yeah, the scale divisions aren't linear that way.  Deal with it. 

     P.S. So, I go to some transmitter company's website and there's a guy asking, "Suppose I had to hike up a mountain through the snow to replace some major subassemblies in an FM transmitter, what tools should I carry?" Here's my answer: you should be having to explain to your boss why there aren't tools up there already, taken up when the weather was good! C'mon, you don't need anything fancy, the basic electronics tool set has changed little since the 1930s other than VOMs are better and cheaper. You're already going to be lugging one or more power supplies and/or RF amps, kid, you shouldn't have to haul a clanking pile of screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers, too. Harbor Freight is your friend. $200 in tools beats dead in a snowdrift every time.  It's not the ne plus ultra in hand tools?  So what.

Your Hostess Is Ill

     Sick, sick, sick and I don't mean possibly.

     All this past long weekend, I was fighting copious sinus drainage and mild sore throats every morning.  "Allergies," thunk I, and took OTC allergy meds.  It helped, too.

     Woke up this morning with More Of Same, gargled salt water, took allergy meds, went to work, sinuses filling up every hour...

     Along about 1400, I could no longer breathe through my nose.  Not even a little.  And I was dizzy.  By 1600, I was staying in my chair as much as possible and getting more and more short-tempered.  Left, shivering, a tad after 1830, about par.  Ran the vents on recirc, no cooling, in a car that'd sat out in the sun all day and I was still feeling a bit chilly.

     I'm home now, enjoying tea, soup, toast and kale/orzo salad.  I'm gonna take a bath and go to bed.

     Tomorrow's blogging may be late.

Sunday, Rangeday

     After a perfectly remarkable breakfast Sunday, Tam, Shootin' Budy, Turk and I were off to Eagle Creek Park Pistol Range.

     For those of you just tuning in, Indy's vast city park has a (weekends only) public shooting range!  (IMPD uses it five days a week).  As befits a big park, it's a big range:

No, bigger than that; this is just Bay 1 of two identical areas!

     I was shooting okay:

     See?

     ...Okay, it was only 25-some feet.

     And here's the stable:

     I left the Combat Masterprice,er,  Masterpiece at home, making room for the little H&R.  Left to right:  Colt Police Positive, Ruger MK II with Pac-Lite upper, H&R and Iver Johnson top-break and High Standard Sentinel.  It counts sequentially: six shooter, seven-shooter, eight-shooter, nine-shooter and a ten-shot semiauto.

     The H&R is new to my collection and has remarkably little felt recoil, more like an air pistol than a .22.  Maybe it's the very small frame.  All are nice but if I could only own one handgun, I'd take the High Standard over the rest: it's got good sights, I shoot well with it and it's never done anything but go "bang!" when I pull the trigger.  (The Ruger/Pac-Lite is nice, but every so often it goes "jam," instead.  I never liked jam.)

     A morning well spent, several hundred rounds downrange. 

Saturday: BlogMeet, Art Fair, Movie

     Do I look tired?  Sleepy?  It's been a busy couple of days!

     Saturday's main event was -- of course! -- the BlogMeet:

     Owen, Old Grouch, Turk Turon, me, Tam, Shootin' Buddy, Joanna.

     After awhile, The Jack arrived, too:

     (Also, in background, Nameless Visitor Dog and barely-visible Owner.)  It was a fine BlogMeet, though I must admit I listened way more than talked, sometimes with my eyes closed.

     You see, we visited the Broad Ripple Art Fair in the morning: a nice bike ride, a lot of walking, and  whole lot of art:

     The next time someone talks to you about "accessible" art, show 'em this tabletop zoo!  I have many more photos but no time to edit.

     After the BlogMeet, we went to the new Star Trek movie.  What can I say?  The usual heavy-handed story-telling, Jim Kirk chews up the scenery, Spock is quizzically skeptic, Bones is a curmudgeon, Scotty pulls a very big rabbit out of a very small hat, evil is (after much struggle) vanquished and the good guys win!  Some nice nods to earlier films, wonderful sets, terrible physics: like James Bond films, you know what's going to be inside when you buy it and the fun is seeing how they do it.  I liked all of it except for the nazified StarFleet uniforms and the painfully drawn-out resolution of one bit of foreshadowing. While the slightly-emo new generation Enterprise crew sure ain't the Old Guard, they're a remarkably respectful reinterpretation of the originals and easy to like. Either you're happy to see Jim (or James) again or you're not.  I was. 

Seen At Dayton Hamvention

Yep.  Turk likes it too.

Begali Key Tester At Dayton Hamvention

Mechanical innovator and key designer par excellence Pietro Begali's key tester, or, as he puts it, "Digital driving mechanical driving digital."

  The solenoids are adjustable for testing any key and it will run for weeks.  Amazing

Is There Another Industrial Revolution Brewing?

     So, y'look over to the Third World and they're ginnin' up ever more efficient charcoal stoves and pot-in-pot fridges (earthenware [mud plus fire], sand and water, plus a breeze) that get the job done and don't rely on the grid; they're charging cellphones and LED lights with junky solar cells and generally managing a better standard of living without The Grid--

     So maybe their kids grow up with more time and more light to learn more and figure out even kewler stuff--

     And meanwhile, down at the Internet Cafe, their third cousin once removed is runnin' a 419 scam--

     What's gonna happen in the next generation or so, when off-the-grid engineers meet robber-baron-esque survivor-scamsters?

     And meanwhile, back here in the First and Second (and/or aspiring) Worlds, the prices of roofing shingles and solar cells are fixing to meet up, while a zillion thrifty Chinese have already installed solar water heaters.  For some industrial customers in the U.S., their power companies already pay more for sold-back "green electricity" from solar or hydroelectric sources than they charge the same business old-fashioned "dirty" power.

     I'm thinking the End Of The Grid is a distant glimmering.  And that may be as wild a card as the species has dealt itself since steam.

     (Here's an excellent example of simple engineering vs. poverty.  Please note the solutions suggested don't suddenly shove people into rocket science.  It's incremental in ways that provide immediate benefit without people having to relearn basic aspects of living.)