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Showing posts from January 9, 2005

Machinery Infatuation

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I bought my first NEW piece of farm machinery. I am not sure if this is a failure or a success, but it is different. I picked up a NEW Rotary Cutter (bush hog, brush hog, mower, etc) from a dealer. It cost me almost as much as the tractor did with its bits of hardware and options. It seems to work well on the CNH Boomer 33. I planned on getting up to NY in the next couple of days, but Gracie has been sick.. she has been up and down. The steroid treatment and a change in diet seem to be helping at this point. Besides hauling the tractor and mower up to NY I have numerous events planned over the next month. I will be in Charlotte for a conference as well as Tucson Arizona and of course other events and activities. I started installing radio equipment in the Humvee. It now has a telescoping 30 foot antenna, a 24 volt to 12 volt converter, a removable SDR radio and some other stuff to be sure. I'd like to get it to the Stone Mountain Hamfest -- thats what i am shooting for. I thr...

White Knuckle Driving

Bonnie and I had an interesting experience this evening. We heard a strange noise that stopped us mid-sentance. She described it as an explosion. I described the noise as a rolling casacde as if something fell from the roof. I took the big spotlight out to check the house, stove pipe, the barn, the llamas. After some more discussion we figured out what the strange and unusual sound was... it turned out to be a strange noise indeed. It was the town snowplow. Yes, it is that quiet on the farm that a normal sound like a snowplow can be really load and unexpected. Partly, because although it snows a lot, we dont have that many snowplows. I had the worst drive to work this past week. I was traveling 5 mph down one of our hills (in neutral) and still had the antilock brakes kicking in! Just keep the machine between the ditches! We made it. White knuckles
Cool Creatures the Tsunami washed up!! The above link is definately worth checking out. It is in Russian but the pics are worthwhile. We live on a bizzare world. I went to the hamfest in Marathon this morning. I picked up a few connectors, some 100Mbps NICs for a buck a piece and a few other morsels of electronics. I am receiving quotes for my new truck. The prices are coming in where I expected (a lot lower that most would think they would). I will sell my current truck in the summer. I will make a decision on a truck and a dump trailer soon. I have been asked to speak to of a bunch of gun instructors tommorow about presentation skills. That should be fun. They are having the seminar at the Gander Mountain store so I will pick up a few lures when I am down there. Maybe some game loads too... I know, I need a clay pidgeon launcher. I will look for one of them as well. This past week I was riding around with electric fork lift service techs in the Albany area. I...
I am working mostly on computers again this weekend. I am moving all the files into their appropriate storage areas. I have a quite a bit more to do. I am stuck with a 10 Mbps NIC in the machine I am typing on now (Pentium 233 we threw together). Simultaneous Internet access and file transfers can take quite a while. The progress box on the other machine here says 98 minutes.... uh oh, something is weird. I am setting the new "work box" up to easily accept strange hard drives. It is a dual boot machine with linux and windoze. I will be adding a 5-1/4 in floppy drive to the complement of I/O. It has both MFM and IDE controllers. I am skipping all SCSI and CDROMs for now. Other future projects will be to figure out how to get the data of the C64 disks so we can run those games we had so much family fun with in a 6500 emulator that must be out there. I sent out a bunch of RFQs for my new truck and dump trailer. It will be interesting to see what I get back. I did it by p...