Margaret and I celebrated my birthday yesterday evening with a nice romantic dinner. With the kids at Grandma’s, we had the house all to ourselves. We started off with fillet mignon sauteed in butter with onions, mushrooms and chilies, stir fry veggies served on the side, black olives and a nice pinot grigio red wine.

After dinner, we enjoyed a Dairy Queen Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard ice cream cake. Thankfully, we didn’t have to put the fire department on alert prior to lighting the candles. Instead, we used two rows of 4 candles and 1 to grow on. She asked me what I wished for and I didn’t tell her, but I’m sure she knows what I wished for anyway.

For gifts – in addition to the cool cell phone she got me earlier this month – Margaret got me a spicy cuisine cookbook, a pouch of sweet rolling tobacco, a pack of rum dipped cigarillos, a good butane lighter and a wonderful tasting – yet rather expensive – Monte Cristo Cigar. She knows I’m fond of Fuente’s Opus X, but they are $160+ for a box of 4 and the local dealer was out of stock. Regardless, the Monte Cristo was an excellent choice!

With all the tobacco products my wife got me for my birthday, I can’t help but wonder; is she pampering me and my indulgence and enjoyment of unhealthy sinful habits or is she plotting to get rid of me by sending me to an early grave? I may never know, but one thing is for sure, she gave me a wonderful celebration to be remembered for a very long time. TNX, Honey! I couldn’t ask for a better birthday – or for that matter, a better wife ;)

Sorry for the absence, folks. I’ve been on somewhat of a sabbatical. Things here have been bizarre to say the least. I was working on my mobile ham radio antenna project and then other distractions followed suit. First and most importantly, the wife was in the hospital for a week, but she’s OK and recovering nicely. I promised her I would not divulge any more information on that, so just keep her in your prayers for her continued recovery. Secondly, before that little incident, she got me an early birthday present: an HTC Pure smart phone with a two year “unlimited” contract with AT&T. Believe it or not, that’s what we get the best reception on where we live. Anyway, this thing’s got Windows Mobile 6.5 on it and FWIW, I find it to be a remarkable piece of equipment. There have been many poor reviews on this phone, but since it’s a Windows OS, I’ve been hacking the crap out of it for the past two weeks. I’ve just about got it to where I want it, but it’s going to take me a few more days playing with it to get it there.

The user interface is driven by HTC’s Touch Flo 3D technology. To put it mildly, it sucks. So does all the bloatware that came with it. I ripped out that lame interface and installed SPB Mobile Shell 3.5. It’s an awesome user interface with a 3D carousel and other 3D features that make it much more versatile and enjoyable. Plus there’s lots of apps out there for download to play with, most notably, the GPS apps.

Then I got news that an old friend of mine from 20 years ago passed away back in September. After hearing about it, I spend the next few days looking up old friends who knew him in order to pass the word along. There was good news, however; His brother who was fighting Leukemia at the time was reported to be alive and well and living only 20 minutes from my house. Unlike his brother that passed away, this guy had a heart of gold. He was a firefighter who left the fire company before 9-11 and ended up beating the cancer! It’s been a trip down memory lane calling up and chatting with friends you used to hang with from 20 years ago, always wondering what ever happened to them. Kudos to Facebook for making these reunions possible. Turns out that after one of those recent conversations with one of my closest friends, I found out that he lives right up the hill from me not 3 minutes away! Damn, we had some great times together and I can’t wait to see him again someday soon.

As far as politics are concerned, I’ve already placed several calls to my US Representative’s office in DC and although I have little hope of him changing his vote on Obamacare, because he’s a hardcore Dem, at least I gave it my best shot. Weather it passes or not, I hope every last statist assclowns in Washington gets the boot in November. If this monstrosity of a health care overhaul does get passed, it will be tied up in courts for months to come and it will end up getting shoved down our throats one way or another. If it doesn’t pass, the leftists are going to shove it through in a piece-meal fashion, regardless. Either way, like I said back on November 5th, 2008, we’re screwed. Even if in the next two subsequent elections we get a government that holds strict adherence to our Constitution and even if every last commie in both elected and appointed office was hung by the neck until dead for their acts of treason (my little wet dream), it would still take more than 20 years to fix the damage done over the past two years by Obama, Bush and all the criminals in the US Congress.

Cup still half full??? Yep, despite the fact that somebody replaced my beer with turpentine.

I’m just about 90% finished modeling all the components and the assembly of my screwdriver antenna. The only thing left to model is the bracket which will attached to the right rear frame on my ‘06 Jeep Grand Cherokee. In the way of a completely modeled assembly, I need to get the miscellaneous hardware (screws, nuts, washers, etc.) from McMaster-Carr. They conveniently have 3d models for downloading of all the hardware I need to purchase from them. I also have to finish mapping the parts with material images to make them look real (stainless steel, Delrin plastic, gray PCV, aluminum, etc.). Once I have all this computer modeling finished, I need to shop around for a machinist willing to do one-offs of all the parts at a reasonable price. I’ve got a drill press and I can also do most of the cutting and welding, but most of the parts will need to be either water-jetted or CNC machined.

Side Note: Tomorrow is the wife’s B-Day, so I will be out most of the day today and tomorrow. Won’t she be surprised when she sees what got her. :D

Thursday morning I woke to a lovely snowfall. By noon it was snowing like mad and we had about 5 inches on the ground. By 4:30pm we had about 10 inches and I decided to venture outdoors to clear the snow in order to make cleanup much easier the following day.

We knew it was getting bad. That afternoon, Orange County declared a state of emergency that was to last until 6:00am the following morning. About 9:00pm that evening we lost power. I tried to hook up a power inverter to the Jeep as a makeshift generator, but the output was insufficient to run the furnace or the well pump. I’ve been saving for a more powerful generator system, but as of yet, we just haven’t saved up enough so the inverter was all we had to work with. It was dark, we had no running water and we were preparing ourselves to wake in the morning to a very cold house.

Friday came and so did news that the state of emergency had been extended until 6:00pm that evening… and the temperature inside the house had dropped to 52 degrees. I went outside, filled gallon freezer bags with snow and stuffed the fridge and freezer to protect the perishables. We ate cold cereal, PB&J sandwiches, cold chicken from the night before and thankfully we had plenty of bottled water. I even BBQ’d some burgers on my propane grille for lunch and got them medium rare before I ran out of propane. Throughout the day as the snow fell, the solar radiation which sifted through the overcast sky actually warmed the house by 8 whole degrees. Unfortunately, we knew that once darkness fell, the temperature inside would fall even more than the night before.

At 4:30pm I decided to go out for the second snow clearing. By that time we had somewheres in the neighborhood of 18-20″ of wet and heavy snow. Thanks to my efforts the night before, I only had to clear some 8-10″ of snow from around the house.

Then, by 6:30, we finally got word from the power company (NYS Electric and Gas or NYSEG) of an estimated restoration time; midnight the following day! Screw that!!! 30 minutes away, my Mom had power, heat and phone, so we packed up the family and spent the night at Grandma’s house. There were a few tree limbs down on the road getting there, but we managed to make it to her house by 8:00pm. Next morning, Saturday the 27th, we woke up in warm beads, had a hot breakfast and took hot showers.

We finally got word from the utility company that power was restored that afternoon, so after an early dinner, we packed up and journeyed back home. The house was still warming up when we got there and thankfully most of the food in the fridge was still OK.

What a nightmare!!! It’s amazing how we overlook such simple luxuries in our daily lives! Needless to say, I don’t want to get caught with my male appendage swinging in the breeze like that again. I am determined to step up my efforts in preparation for future SHTF scenarios. Generator, backup propane tanks, more dry food storage, more ammo, etc… oh, and get finished building that damned antenna!

Shame on me. I’ve been absent from posting the past few days. My excuse this time is that I’ve been working again on designing a “screwdriver antenna” for my Icom 706MKIIG mobile ham radio. I don’t feel like getting into the technical aspects of what a screwdriver antenna is, but I will say that I think it’s the most superior tunable antenna in existence. Anyway, I started designing it a year ago and after half a year, I finally completed an acceptable and detailed 2D layout in CAD. I also procured about 80% of all the materials needed to build the thing. After taking a 5 to 6 month sabbatical, I’ve decided to get back onto completing it, but this is easier said than done. I need to find a machine shop that will mill me a bunch of one-off parts at a reasonable price. Oh, and I still as-of-yet have to sit for my ham radio technician’s ticket (junior operator’s license). I’m all studied up for it, but I just haven’t gotten around to taking the damned test.

In addition to working on my SHTF-EOTW preparedness hobby, I’ve also been trying my hand at the newest versions of AutoCAD. I’ve been using that design platform for close to 20 years now and it is remarkable how far the technology has advanced. Most of the tools integrated into the newer versions today were the result of others like myself who had to write our own LISP and C++ programs years before to help get jobs done more efficiently. Today, it’s all about solid modeling, 3D design and presentation. I’ve been doing 3D work off and on over the past 15 years or so, but never have I been able to design in real time 3D until recently over the past 5 years. One of the major reasons for this is that it has taken so long for affordable hardware to finally catch up to the demands of the software requirements in order to efficiently perform such complex tasks. So now, I’m working on converting my design over to 3D and I am just having too much fun doing it. And for all you perverts out there who can’t get your minds out of the gutter, the image above is not that of a sex toy. It happens to be the gear-motor assembly which I have designed for my screwdriver antenna.

Bottom line here is that once again I am forced to ask for your patience while I labor toward the completion of this unfinished project. As it starts coming together, I will post more about my progress. Other postings may be light around here for a while, but as usual, if there is some issue that demands my ranting, you can bet that I’ll be right here to express it.

TNX,
The Management

Obama’s lack of constitutional eligibility to serve as POTUS aside, the single most criminal act of this president and his enablers is their brazen determination to torpedo our domestic and international economic superiority through unconstitutional executive, legislative and judicial fiat. Throughout our nation’s history, we have proven over and over again that the driving force behind our strength and prosperity has been our system of unrestrained free market enterprise. Government controlled socialist bureaucracies combined with burdensome taxation policies inevitably lead to clipping unemployment, authoritarian dependence, intellectual slavery and runaway entitlement mentality. For years the Chinese have known that they would be unable to defeat us due to this fact alone. Unrestrained innovation and ability to produce wealth has enabled us to achieve what China and the Soviet Union has been unable to accomplish through decades of communist control. By rendering our Constitution impotent through a process of progressive policies, the leadership of this country is condemning us to absolute failure and destruction. In all honesty, impeachment and censure for criminals such as these would be too light a punishment for such treason.

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
Daily Mail Online
By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010

* Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming…

*snip*

You know what amazes me even more than the absolute arrogance and determination of the Obama administration to combat AGW by taxing carbon emissions? It’s the fact that the most outspoken critics in the media against this ridiculous hoax are from the same country where PM Margaret Thatcher started this lie about “global warming” in the first place back in 1988 in order to turn public sentiment against the striking coal miner’s union! AND SHE WAS A LEADER OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY!!!

Ok, I think I’ve had enough confusion to last me a lifetime. Screw this, I’m going to bed.

30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says
FOXNews.com
Updated January 11, 2010

From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.’s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age.

From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.’s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age.

Oranges are freezing and millions of tropical fish are dying in Florida, and it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze, says Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world’s leading climate modelers…

*snip*

Well, all I gotta say is that we are sooooooo lucky to have such intelligent and responsible elected officials in Washington who would never even think about increasing taxes on gasoline and heating oil and other petroleum based sources of energy. I’m positive they know what effect that would have on our economy and the ability of folks to afford to stay warm in the coming ice age… right? …I mean, right? RIGHT?!?!

Obama’s 2011 Budget Tax Hikes Contradict Focus on Job Creation

Wall Street Journal Online
By CURTIS S. DUBAY
From the Heritage Foundation
FEBRUARY 5, 2010, 5:20 P.M. ET

President Obama has said his number one goal for 2010 is to create jobs, but the abundance of tax increases in his recently released 2011 budget contradict this objective.

Higher taxes on businesses, upper-income taxpayers, and fossil fuels; an increased death tax; and new taxes to pay for health care would destroy jobs and slow economic recovery. Congress should reject these higher taxes and the rest of its business-killing agenda to speed economic growth and encourage job creation…

*snip*

The tax increases proposed in the budget break down into six broad categories:

1. Higher Taxes on Businesses…

*snip*

2. Higher Taxes on Upper-Income Earners…

*snip*

3. Death Tax Increase…

*snip*

4. Higher Energy Taxes. The budget increases taxes on oil, gas, and coal companies by repealing several tax credits available to these businesses.

These energy companies would undoubtedly pass these tax increases on to customers in the form of higher prices, which will increase costs across the entire economy. And higher taxes on energy would act as yet another deterrent to job creation, since they increase the cost of doing business, which includes hiring new workers and retaining existing ones.

5. Health Care Taxes…

*snip*

6. Other Taxes. The budget includes several other tax increases, including taxing carried interest as regular income, closing the tax gap through stricter enforcement, more taxes on businesses, and making the unemployment insurance surtax permanent.

This long list of tax increases shows that the Administration is desperate for revenue and looking under every rock to squeeze more and more money out of individual taxpayers and businesses…

*snip*

-emphasiss mine