Today on the water I was "prop washed" by a friend while driving another persons boat. They hit my boat and cracked the stern. Talk about a crazy day. Thankfully it was not my fault (as I was not moving at the time nor had engine running) but wow what drama. Good to have friends with boats and not own boats! 

just passed my boaters card easy tip for test

google with this site:boat-ed.com to assist in answer hunting

Japan version – lots of cool stuff like SSH and SCP and CYGN on the fly as well as real slick record and play back

http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/ttssh2/releases/

also found this version

http://www.ayera.com/teraterm/

what is cool about it .. it has a web front end.. so you can put a serial console on a webpage javascript and access a console via HTTP/browser interesting

So I thought I would take this time to chat about my recent vacation I just took. We went to the Bahamas, before we go there. actually about 12 hours before we flew I told katie LETS get dive certified! She was only half excited about this because as I mentioned this was . now about 10 hours before the flight.

So we busted out some PADI education like crazy then did our open water dives then after that we did some fun dives. so far 310min with a max UW depth of 105fsw we did some wreck dives as well as some shark and fun coral dives. Totally awesome! I am hooked and hopefully Katie enjoys the hobby so we can do it more and more!

But as I sit on my flight with wifi at 30k feet up in the air I thought it only fitting to blog about being 100ft below!

I just passed all my classroom material for a OpenWater 1 Divers Certificate! next is the actual dive!

With summer comes lots of work and slacking off, blogs get slow. Recently I have been working on a portable APRS beacon as well as getting the truck working good. Might start a new project of a go-kart.

Yard work and keeping things clean are the main tasks other then working a LOT

Recently had my brothers wedding which was fun, havent seen any photos from it yet.

Fernando's Batch Party was also just this last week we shot a lot of stuff.

I remember making this animated GIF back in 1998 and this page was "cool" it was using the most advanced code I could scrape up haha.

check out my web page back in 1998 this was like revision 3 I know somewhere I have my first ever page that was live on the internet

just as an example if you think this is "crazy" and not correct for old internet pages cnn.com didnt get created untill 2000, and this is what microsoft.com looks like in 1998

you say wow that looks good compared to yours haha check out the Whitehouse official page see that book background! and check it out links to links!

So I have a upcoming camping trip that I wanted to be prepared for and since buying the truck I was concerned with the camper weight on it. The previous owner had it on there for who knows how long and the truck looks like it just handles the load, dont get me wrong it drove fine breaks fine no problems there. But after loosing the old truck to a rear axel failure I didnt want that to happen again right away! the GVW of the truck is 8500 and it looks like the camper weights more then 2000 (truck is about 6 with me in it) So I went searching for a way to deal with the load and truck performance. I found the following product that was simpler then air-bags, no fuss no mess install once and your off. Roadmaster Active Suspension Springs.

It seems to be a patented product or something as they are the only ones who sell such a beast. they were cheap with a deal I had form JCWhitney so I went for it with no real evidence on if I should buy them or not. So I installed them no problem at all took about 3 hours only because it was all dirty and rusty and so I cleaned up everything down there and painted what I could with rustolium.

Once I put them on I couldnt wait to go drive about, instant change. My shocks are shot I know that and I dont care to pay the 100 bucks for new shocks (25 bucks a pop x4) for new ones but WOW when I go over a speed bump its just like in my car now. Later I put the camper on the truck, it had been about 2 months since I last had it on so I forgot how it felt but I must say its tight and responsive and the springs are sprung so they are working with my old truck springs for the greater good!

I was very happy with my purchase wanting to take some of the load off the factory 40 year old springs as well as add some stability to the truck, oh yes I should say that I stopped at a scale, with no H2O on board and full gas + passenger I clocked in at 9100 that is 600 over my GVW yikes! I just hope that Dyna60 lasts and lasts, I might give it new bearings this fall!

RAS installed on 1978 F250 SuperCab 4x4 with Dyna60 Rear

and yes I put the spring retainer clip on 90* wrong, that is now fixed

when I tuned the springs on my truck I did it so I could put a dime in-between the coils rather then the quarter the documentation suggested as I read this on other posts by people with old trucks.

So I have a problem with the new engine overheating only at idle, since I just pulled apart the whole thing I know my cooling is 100% perfect. However Still having issues with the heat only when I dont move and only at idle parked. I needed a fan shroud or a electric fan to fix this. However a shroud is 120 bucks and good fans are 300 bucks. I dont want to put any more cash into the project at this time so I asked around the neighborhood to all the new friends I have made. My local HAM pal had a RV fan shroud from a 1970's Chevy. He gave it to me with the note that it cant ever come back to him!

Yahoo free stuff. with a sawz-all and a bit of hardware for mounting I did a awesome job with it, and it corrected the problem instantly!

so I started some projects to get working on all digital modes that I have not yet tested and tried one of them was packet radio. mostly because I have no TNC and see no huge reason to buy one.

I never saw much of a reason for APRS I don't want to publicly send my location out, but then I started goofing off with it. I'm hooked its so simple and fun to see what hams are in the parking lot I am in I just had to get more involved with it. Also being that I am a self proclaimed digital master I couldn't just ignore the mass consumption of APRS. I got the following software installed on my portable station laptop and started to run with it.

The Required Software TNC is available here the file is AWGPE you just need that zip file, I strongly suggest that you pay for this software at least the TNC pro version because its way cool and you didnt have to buy a real hardware TNC  it also allows you to set up a virtual IP adaptor to connect your system directly to a WAN over your radio port (cool!)

Also available from that site is the same authors AWGTracker application which will allow you to set up a APRS server that is directly connected to a local MicrosoftMapPoint so you can track local with no internet, it also connects up to google maps live. This application has real cool WX monitoring options and replay for telemetry very cool

This software works great its especially great to get started in learning how to tune and position the antenna for the packet RX since its all by the same author the applications work flawless together. Get started with that.

After I was looking into the applications some more one thing I didnt like was how the AWGTracker would send the waypoints over to MicrosoftMapPoint it just didnt look great. I then found this awesome application called APRSISCE/32 you can get it from the yahoo group then after you get the up-to date copy you can enable the developer downloads and get a copy that will work with AWGPE. This application is very cool, same stuff as AWGTracker minus the cool telemetry logging but I can download open map files from the internet and cache them on the laptop, before I leave I just download maps for the area I want to review and then I have a portable up to date quality map with tracking with no connection to the internet!

I have more post's later about this topic and how much more I got into it but for now that kicks off my new digital mode and how to get started for free as well as what software to use to get started with it!