2014!
I guess I am a few days late. Lets face it, my blog hasn't been a priority as of late. Which is why I kinda let it fall apart there last month. But it is back now, and I re-engineered it over the holidays. So that is good. I also have some other domains I have outsourced to some of my friends.
whackynoise.com will be one of my friends domains for his Noise stuff. He does some sort of performance art where he uses hacked electronics and random objects to make musical noise sets. The domain was originally to feature custom made noise generators that we built from scratch. We were planning on eventually manufacturing a few of these and seeing how they would sell.
hamshockers.com and wnyshockers.com is still going to be for the Shockers Radio Cub, but one of my other friends will be taking care of it which will help me out. The Shockers Radio Club will hopefully become a real thing this year, as our plan is to form a real official radio club, and have a hamfest of our own to raise funds for a new digital repeater for the Buffalo area. We also have some plans for a 5GHz network which can act as a standby internet system. The Shockers is a radio club designed to be aimed towards the younger more energetic crowd, and focuses on R&D and non standard ham operation. If you are a ham in the Buffalo / Niagara region, and this sounds interesting to you, please let me know. We would love to make new friends and have some members help us get this off the ground.
In other ham radio news, I did get my longwire setup complete, however I ended up blowing out my finals on my FT-857D.... I guess 100 Watts on SSB is not a good idea. Especially with a match allowing 180watts forward and 1 watt reverse. o.O I don't know... Either way that gives me something else to work on and fix. But it is an easy enough fix I believe.
Gaming wise, I have been focusing on Company of Heroes, Company of Heroes 2, and Arma 3. I currently have an Arma 3 server online. I am also trying to maintain my Farming Simulator 2013 server, and my Minecraft server which is Myst themed. But currently both are down. My Team Fortress 2 server is only up right now for special events. I am really in need of another server, and a faster internet service. The Company of Heroes trend is mainly my friend Dennis's doing as he enjoys that game. It is a game I have put many hours into in the past, and I am not afraid to dive into it again. I don't think they expected me to be as good at it as I am at it either. But I enjoy it.
I have been working day shift for about 2 months now. I am enjoying it so far. I find that I do drink more coffee now that I am on days, when I never drank any coffee on nights. Strange eh? I don't understand that one, but that seems to be the way of the world.
Working days exposes me to more variety, and also more big shots. I recently did a network install for the new Chief Information Officer. I did some research on him, as I wondered what his background was, and found that he is fairly typical for this place... A fraud. He has a personal website for IT Consulting, and it says right on it that it was made in GoDaddy Website Builder. Someone who is experienced in IT and can't even make their own websites? Seriously? Yeah right.
Anyhow, I rarely talk about work on here for a reason... Its a government job, and they tend to frown on that sort of thing. So I try to be vague on purpose in that regard.
2014 promises to be an interesting year. I plan on doing some home improvements, and going on a few trips. For the first time in many years, I will be slightly ahead of the game. I am still a little behind financially, but that is sorting itself out. Now that my wife and I have camping gear, I may consider some local camping as well as the mandatory Algonquin trip. I was thinking of some naturalist camp grounds, but not sure about where to go, and if I would fit in or not.