Between episodes of 24 the game around here lately has been Communications Systems.  A midterm tomorrow that I almost have to get an A on has kept me away from much else, but I have done a little work on the website that I am working freelance on.  Another Solar Flare yesterday was an X20+, actually overloading the sensors that measure flares for a full 11 minutes.  Looks like that one will be the largest ever recorded.  If the flare had been pointing at Earth, and not off into space, we’d probably be seeing Aurora farther south than last week, but of course, if a flare of that magnitude hit us broadside, the Aurora would be the least of our worries.  Folks in commercial airliners at high latitudes would be getting radiation doses 100 times that of a normal X-Ray.  Not fun stuff. 

Here we are, 8 hours into the contest, and already improving over last year’s score.  We’re hoping the European run in the morning will push us well over the top.  Having an extra radio thanks to Thorsten Prutz, K5TCP, has helped out immensly. 

We spent all afternoon working on antennas, and of the 2 new ones that we put up one isn’t working.  The small tribander is working, however, and should come in really useful in the morning, granted that storms tonight don’t take it down. 

If you’re trying to reach me, send me an email; I’ll have my phone off until about 7:00 Sunday.  If it’s an emergency, call my girlfriend, she knows how to get in touch with me quickly.

Technically we’re 7-0 after tonight’s blowout playoff win.  Of couse, that’s really 4-0 to those of you who know we had 3 games in the regular season forfeited to us.  Nevertheless, I had two personal fouls called on me tonight, one being a good call but just a screw-up on my part (thought I had just the flags, almost pulled off his shorts), which admittedly let them score their only TD of the game.  The other PF was when, as the last man downfield on a runner, I planted solid and the guy just ducked his shoulder and bowled into me.  How’s that a PF on me, you ask?  Yeah, I’m not so sure of that one either – apparently the ref saw my feet come off the ground.  Well sure they did – he ran right into me.  Surprise, surprise.  Of course this one ended good for us – four plays later they still hadn’t converted the one yard into another TD.  Two plays later Whit ran it 60 yds for our final TD.  Muy bueno. 

Our next game is Thursday night at 10:00pm on the intramural fields.  Come out and see how we do – this game will decide the championship, even though its the semifinals.  The team we are playing should be our only competition left.  Whoever wins Thursday should have Friday’s game in the bag no problem.

After replacing 3 chips on Photius’s mainboard, it turns out that I fried his brain.  Changing the memory and addressing chips had no effect, but a known-to-be-working processor did the trick.  I’ll have to run over to Tanner’s at lunch and pick up another one.  It sounds bad – but it’s actually good; it’s one of the easiest chips on the board to replace (as far as orientation), but it’s also the most expensive chip on the board, at about $10 new and $6 used.  No big deal, I just want to try and avoid going through 10 of them.

No Government class today, woohoo.  Not that it was on the top of my priority list to show up anyway.  Oh, and it’s payday.  (Lifts hands to the heavens shouting praise).  I can now do … something … that I didn’t have the money to do before today.

It’s been a busy week. I got the source to myParts finally posted, after a week and a half spree of editing and debugging that resulted in a lot of changes to the backend and even more to the interface. Having spent most of last week actually using the software at work, I am extremely pleased with how it has turned out thus far. There are some shortcomings of how I designed the backend, most are a result of my poor understanding of PHP when the project started nine months ago, but many of these I have slowly been chipping away at.

On other web fronts, I am doing some freelance design work for a church in CA. I’ve got a good deal of the frontend to the site done, and have started on the mySQL database backend. If you want to keeps tabs on the site as it evolves, its online here.

On other fronts, I’ve got a systems and controls midterm today that I am lees than excited about,
Schwarzenegger is the Governer of California, and it rained frogs on the east coast during Hurricane Isabel. What an interesting world we live in.