When the www.mikeoconnor.net is changed over I will be cleanning up the directories of the site, and after a few days after the change over you will not be able to access the blog via the www.mikeoconnor.net/blog address as that address will not exist, target date will be around September 30 of this year. This is just a heads up for those of you that have links or bookmarks to my site.
I have added a “News aggregator” And over time I will be move all the RSS feeds I read from the RSS readers on my computers to the web based system, so I can have access to it anywhere. Also I am making it available to every one on the net since these are things that I find interesting, and I hope every one here might find them of uses. Unfortunately the system I am using only understands RSS and does not understand ATOM feeds. But I did find that feed burner does allow people to create a RSS feed from any ATOM feeds (and the other way around too) so when I find a blot that is on blogger I will just get a new feed address from feedburner to get an RSS feed for my news aggregator.
I will be remapping my web site. You will see the following changes to the address for my web site.
http://blog.mikeoconnor.net – This blog
http://rpg.mikeoconnor.net – The WiKi for the rpg game some of my friends and I are playing
http://news.mikeoconnor.net – A news aggregator of the rss feeds I read
http://www.mikeoconnor.net – A new intro page
http://photos.mikeoconnor.net – A link to my photo gallary
http://videos.mikeoconnor.net – A link to my video gallary
I finally got some audio from Radio Sweden. I got it tonight, and it is up here, as an mp3 It is about an anniversary of some boat that did trade with China. They don’t seam to be very forgiving of their ancestors though, the had some very harsh words for the people that did trade.
I was tuning around the Short Wave Radio band tonight, and there seems to be more active now then it has been for a while. I wonder exactly what is causing the upsurge in activity tonight. It is nice to have more stations to listen to. They are coming very nicely, I am still having some signal strength problems, but I think the main problems for me on that are that one I am inside the city, and two that I have the antenna in my apartment, both of those are not very conducive to receiving radio signals. I do try to compensate for the disadvantages I have there by having a very long antenna in my apartment, I have about 450 feet of wire wrapped around my apartment to compensate for the fact that I am in the city and have the antenna in my apartment.
And for those of you who are into the creative commons copyright, it looks like Radio China will be doing an article on it in the near future. The freq is somewhere between 9.2 and 9.8Mhz. Sorry that I can not be more exact with the freq, but I am using an older radio where the marker is a little bit off, and the bandspread is not dead on the freq and its marker is a little bit off too. It is about 500Khz off when the bandspread is set to 0, but it does change as you raise the bandspread is at about 90, I am trying to adjust for the bandspread missaliment here (it reads about 20 but to the best guess I can come to is that the aliment is about 70 off) And for the freq marker it is readding ~9.1Mhz. so I would guess about 9.69Mhz or about there somewhere.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is running an artical on how the Fire union is backing Republican canidate for mayor of Pittsburgh: Joe Weinroth. I did not belive this when I read it at first. But being this is Pittsburgh I will still put my money on the Democrate canidate to win. You know the 2 parties are Democrate and out of office, been that way since the 1930’s.
Bush has asked people to conserve gas again. I have a way people can conserve gas. I have posted about this before. But I will restate it since I think it is a good idea. You can bike to work. The good thing about this, is it just might save you time in your day. Here is how, if you take time out of your day to go to the gym, you can cut that out since you will get your exercise going to work and back home. Also depending on where you live it could be faster on the bike then in a car. Think about how much time you waste in traffic, I know that if I want to go from the Oakland section of Pittsburgh to the Point, I can make it in 20 minutes no mater what time of day it is. I can even make this 20 minutes during rush hour, where it could take over an hour, in a car. And to the question of “well how can you do this if you obey the laws” well here is how, I go down to the jail trail which is a bike trail so I don’t have to worry about being stuck behind cars or having to stop at lights since there are no cars or traffic lights.
The latest scanner net is now up on the podcast site for it at http://scanner.hamradiobb.com
I went on the bike ride I was working on getting together. I had only one person show up. It was still fun even though there were not many that showed up. But it did make it easier to get things together since both of us were hams and we were able to make contact via the radio before we saw each other.
Tomorrow (Sunday) is the bike ride, for any one that wants to go. This is mainly for hams, so meet around the North Shore around 2pm and give a call out to me (KB3HCG) on 147.48.
I just checked the NHC web site and saw that Rita’s wind speed is down to 135MPH, that is still high but only a Cat 3 level. So maybe it might loss some more speed before hitting land, and lets hope and pray that there is no major damage or that there is no loss of life.
Last night (Sep 22) I got together with some friends to play some RPG. Well not really play just plan for it. We worked on making our characters for the game. The game is The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying game. We probably will not get to play till sometime in October, we are working on mainly the history of our characters, and from there building in the attributes they might have and might need, to work with what drives them. I have put up a wiki for the group to use. I have made it so only people in the group can make changes. I hope the games turns out as fun as the character building meetings we have been having are.
The Trama podcast is now listed on the Pittsburgh Bloggers website The web master did have a nice thing to say about ham radio in the Pittsburgh area, “The Ham Radio community is thriving in Pittsburgh!”
UPDATE: some one made a note, it is org not come, I have fixed that type oh.
CNN is reporting that gas prices after Rita could spike to over $4 maybe $5 I will have to get a picture of it. I have a picture of the $3+ gas price from here in Pittsburgh I don’t drive but I know this will even hurt me, because the companies that deliver the food to the stores from where I buy my food will just pass the cost on to the store, and the store will pass that cost onto the consumers. I am not saying that the companies that pass the cost on are evil, they have to so they can stay in business, and I want them to stay in business because I like to be able to go to the store and get food (even if it is going to cost me 2x as much) But it could be interesting to see gas prices this high. I don’t know if the American population is ready for gas prices this high. One thing is for sure I will be in a much better position then most people since I don’t own a car and don’t have to buy gas. This just might be the breaking point were people will stop driving their cars for frivolous things and start to either walking that 1 mile or taking PT, or do I dare dream it, bike to get from point A to point B. I have seen an upshot in the bikers I see on the road, maybe I will see more people on bikes on the road.
WTNT63 KNHC 212351 TCUAT3 HURRICANE RITA TROPICAL CYCLONE UPDATE NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 650 PM CDT WED SEP 21 2005 ...RITA BECOMES THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE ON RECORD... DROPSONDE DATA FROM AN AIR FORCE RESERVE UNIT RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT AT 623 PM CDT...2323Z...INDICATED THE CENTRAL PRESSURE HAS FALLEN TO BELOW 899 MB...OR 26.55 INCHES. THE DROPSONDE INSTRUMENT MEASURED 32 KT/35 MPH WINDS AT THE SURFACE...WHICH MEANS IT LIKELY DID NOT RECORD THE LOWEST PRESSURE IN THE EYE OF RITA. THE CENTRAL PRESSURE IS PROBABLY AT LEAST AS LOW AS 898 MB...AND PERHAPS EVEN LOWER. FOR OFFICIAL PURPOSES... A PRESSURE OF 898 MB IS ASSUMED... WHICH NOW MAKES RITA THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE IN TERMS OF PRESSURE IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN. SOME ADDITIONAL DEEPENING AND INTENSIFICATION IS POSSIBLE FOR THE NEXT 12 HOURS OR SO. RITA CURRENTLY RANKS BEHIND HURRICANE GILBERT IN 1988 WITH 888 MB AND THE 1935 LABOR DAY HURRICANE WITH 892 MB. FORECASTER STEWART
They are also saying wind speeds of up to 175 MPH. Wow this one is looking worse then Katrina lets all hope and pray that it does not turn out to be as bad as Katrina was with damages and loss of life.
So far this year we have gotten some great JRPGs Persona 3 ReloadedShin Megami Tensei V: VengeanceLike a Dragon: Infinite Wealth And there are still more coming, coming on the 5th of July the one I am most hyped for The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak and latter this year we are getting Metaphor:[…]
Today I weighed myself and came in at 130 pounds. When I started I set a goal of 125 pounds. So only 5 more pounds to go. I am a long way from where I started, I started at 300 pounds on March 31, 2022, it been about 15 months since I started this diet.[…]
With summer coming buy, and me still on my diet, I came up with a snack, I have always enjoyed popsicals, so what I am doing now, is I am taking those water enhancers that say they have 0 calories and use that as the flavor for my popsicals, and I have some popsical makers.[…]
For my friends I did a video to show my friends how I have my apartment setup, because I did some changes to the living room and the bedroom. Here is the video
Posting a new updated before and after picture. First one was taken in 2021, the second picture Just this last weekend.
March 31, 2022 was the day I hit 300 pounds and decided to loss weight, today I weigh in at 135 pounds. To date I have lost 165 pounds. My goal still remains 125 pounds, so I only have 10 more pounds to go. I feel so much better, later on I will post a[…]
Today I did some meal preping for this week. Cooking both in slow cookers. First dish, is a ham and veggie soup contianing Ham Potatos Celery Spinish Carrots Onions Veggie Stock With the amount of stuff and what I put in it, the whole slow cooker has about 1200 cals in it, this should make[…]
Today I did my daily steping on the scale this morning, it read 140 now. So since I started my diet last March, I have lost a total of 160 pounds, and only 15 more pounds to go, till I can start working on keeping the weight off. But I been feeling a lot better[…]
Today, when I did my morning weight in my scale read 143 pounds, so to date I have lost 157 pounds. And now I have only 18 more pounds to go.
In the past I have used a 4G T-Mobile hotspot, that was costing me about 50 a month for 10GB of data. But for that same 50 I could get T-Mobiles home internet. So I cancled the hotspot line and added the Home Internet for my backup internet. First they say there is no data[…]
