Michael P. O'Connor

My Life

A great picture of one of my bettas

Categories: Aquarium

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Published on: August 27, 2005

I was messing around with my camera and my fish and taking some pictures of the fish, most of them did not turn out well at all, but one of them turn out to be that 1 in a 1000 pictures.

I got lucky with this shot, the tank is 10 gallons large, and I was at the end of the tank, so I had to want till he swam over to my side and just as he was turning to go away I snapped this picture.
If any one is intersted I have more pictures of my bettas as follows
Stroustrup
Franklen (the one in the picture above)

Aquatic Gardening

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Aquarium

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Published on: August 27, 2005

Today I did some gardening work in my 2 10 gallon betta tanks. I also did some work in the 10 gallon take I had setup for the baby fish when they were born in my other tank; I have since moved them back to the 20 gallon tank. I am thinking that the 10 gallon tank that the baby fish spent the first 3 months of their lives in might just become another betta tank at the end of the month; I don’t see any reason to let the tank go empty any longer. I also moved the 3 10 gallon tanks around, so that I could have them all together, and placed more lights on it for the plants. Basically it just involved reorienting the two tanks that already had betas in them and putting the third (empty) tank next to them.

PETA hypocrisy

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Politics

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Published on: August 27, 2005

It looks like the so called animal rights group PETA real kill animals. The same group that thinks that animals are more important then humans. Right now I am listing to the 3rd hour of Issues Etc, From August 25 2005 They have as a guest on the person that does the PETA kills animals.com ( you will have to skip to 1/2 though the mp3 to get to the part about PETA). He is going over some of the things that Peta does, aparently they protest Churches, Synogogs and Moscs. When one church tried to get a restraining order on Peta, because the people that in that congregation did not like being harassed every Sunday, trying to keep Peta out of their church, Peta claimed that the church did not have the right to keep them out of the churches private property, and then sued the church. More info on PETA

3rd hour of Issues Etc, From August 25 2005

Deleted some Photos off of the web site

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Web Site

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Published on: August 27, 2005

I deleted some old photos on my photo section. I freed up about 100Mb on my space at my hosting company. So this should allow me to add some other pictures to my web site. I right now only have 280Mb free on my account. I have over 1.5 GB of photos on my web site at this time. I did this originally because for some odd reason one of my albums on my site was not displaying its photos.

The location of my Mac computer

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Misc (no other place to put this stuff)

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Published on: August 26, 2005

I am thinking it would be nice to have a small desk just for my Mac. I would like to put it opposite of my other computers in my technology section of my apartment. I might have to move some things around in my apartment if I get a new table for the place for the Mac.

The Temperature

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Aquarium

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Published on: August 26, 2005

The temperature here has finally fallen below the 80 degree F. I have now turned of the AC unit. I was running the last 3 months because I wanted to keep the temperature of my fish tanks below 90, since if the temperature went above 90 I could loss my fish. Now that it is below 80 I have turned off the AC unit that should save me some money on my electric bill. It is also nice to have the fresh air in my apartment again. We should have 2 maybe 3 months of good weather before the temperature drop to a point where I will have to shut the windows again because it will be to cold.

SWlogger

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Geekdom, Ham Radio, Short Wave Radio Stuff

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Published on: August 26, 2005

I have been putting together the core objects for the SWlogger program. I have so far defined the info I want to track, I am thinking the next step would be to build a testing interface. Once I get a test interface done, I will then go on to testing the interface and the core objects. After I am happy that the interface and core objects are good and correct, I will start with the database. I hope to have this finished by the end of September.

Packet Radio

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Geekdom, Ham Radio, Technology

Comments: 1 Comment

Published on: August 24, 2005

The other day I picked up miscellaneous plugs from Radio shack the other day. I plan on building a cable to go from my computer to my Icom 2100H radio. Also I am going to try setup a packet station. I will not be on all the time like some other stations would be, but I want to play with it. If you are in Pittsburgh and know of any good packet station I can connect to, please leave a message that includes the station callsign and Freq. I should be up and running by the end of the weekend. Also I should note that the stations should be on 2 meters.

Google Earths view of the Point

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Hay it is funny, Pittsburgh stuff

Comments: 2 Comments

Published on: August 23, 2005

I was messing around with Google Earth. I zoomed in on the point (Point State park) and when I looked at it, there was something out of place. When I zoomed in closer there were boats on the land. And I realized that the picture that they are using for that view is from last year after Ivan hit Pittsburgh.

Short Wave radio recording (again)

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Geekdom, Short Wave Radio Stuff

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Published on: August 23, 2005

Last night I went to record my scanner (I did this to test the recording software.) and it worked well, I set it to record a radio station (an FM station, but the thing being record is unimportant right now) and the software recorded the audio well, the only problem there was scanner changed station after an hour and half, but other then that the software record the audio for 3 hours with out problem. So I know can record the short wave radio once I get the earphone plug adaptor. I might post some of the audio I pull off of the air here. But first I have to look into the law about posting record news recording from other countries.

Tropical Depression Jose

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: News

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Published on: August 23, 2005

I just looked over at the National Hurricane Center, and I saw that we are up to Jose, there is also 2 more areas of possible Tropical cyclone development. There is one near Florida; it is so close to land I don’t think it will develop into anything of note. But there is one in the middle of the Atlantic near the equator that one might develop into something. But remember I am not a mythologist so this is all guessing and I could be totally off base here.
I don’t know why I watch the NHC, it is very unlikly that any Hurricane will affect Pittsburgh (but we all remember Ivan last year so who knows.) I just find it fun to watch, it would be cool if Google Earth’s images of the Alantic would be updated each day that would be great to see the storms on the Google Earth program

That was odd

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Blog Stuff, Web Site

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Published on: August 23, 2005

I tryed to make my last entry but every time I tryed to enter it I would get that it was forbidding. So I ended up posting with the Title as test and the entry text as test, and then I selected all the sections I wanted I wanted it in. After entering the post, I went to the database and put the text I wanted in the post in the place of the words “test” and it seameds to haved work, but I wonder what was wrong why it was giving me that issue. Well it seems with this entry all is fine, and there was nothing in the error logs, so I wonder what went wrong.

Short wave radio and scanning recording

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Geekdom, Ham Radio, Play, Technology

Comments: 1 Comment

Published on: August 23, 2005

I am working on finding a good way to record the stuff I listen to off of the short wave radio. and off of the scanner. So far I have tried GarageBand but that has a limit of 1 hour and fifteen minutes. Right now I am trying a program called AudaCity, if it works well, I might post some of the short wave stations that I listen to, I also have to get a converter for the earphone jack on the radio, it has the older style. Also another project I am going to look into (out side of the SWlogger program I am working on) is to build a cable to go between my computers sound card and the Icom 2100. There are some programs out there that will let you use a computer as a TNC. I am hoping to play with packet radio when I build it. I have built a cable before to go between a miniTNC and the Icom 2100 before. The problem the miniTNC was that it only worked with the proprietary program and it only ran on DOS

SWlogger

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Geekdom, Ham Radio, Short Wave Radio Stuff, Technology

Comments: 7 Comments

Published on: August 22, 2005

I have looked around the net for a Short Wave radio logging program. So far I have not found on that I liked. So I figured that this might be a great chance for me to work on learning SQL (mySQL). So I have started the program. Right now I am defining the classes, I am doing this via the data I wish to have stored and reported. So from here I am writing the objects around the data, and just putting a few accessors and mutaters in. After I have defined the basics of the classes, I will go on to the GUI, I probably will use FLTK, and it is the one GUI toolkit I know how to use. Then after that I will go on to figuring out how to read and write it to a database. I have contacted one of my ham friends about it and he said he would like to help, so I got another person on the project.

What a night

by Michael O'Connor

Categories: Ham Radio

Comments: 1 Comment

Published on: August 20, 2005

Well tonight there was an interesting night. At around 5:30 the weather service got on the air looking for some one to take the net. For a few minutes no one responds. So after about 5 minutes, I decide that if no one is going to do it, I might as well do it. That was at about 5:30pm. The net went till about 7:40pm. There were about 20 people that checked in and gave reports. I ended up taking about 6 pages of notes.

There was not much of the bad weather in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh; I did hear some reports that were very close where they were getting hail. But all in all it was an interesting night.

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