Recent projects include, but are not limited to:
Computers: I've been confusing myself with computers since I bought my first one in 1978. That was a used TRS 80. When I needed to upgrade to disk storage I found that a Commodore 64 was cheaper than the expansion interface and disk drive for the Radio Shack offering, so I bought one of those. It has never been beaten for simple word processing. I can't remember the name of the program but we typed it in from a magazine article. It was fast and wonderful. Several other orphan machines and operating systems litter my past. Then, in the early eighties PC clones came along and eventually ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) which allowed freedom from the world of proprietary hardware. My present machine resembles ARS Technica's Budget Box of a year ago. Parallel paths and logic have led through CP/M, DR DOS, Ms DOS, various Windozes, to Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE, Red Hat (again), and now Fedora Core and DSL Linux operating systems. The only reason I keep Windoze around is because The Rosetta Stone has not yet been ported for Linux. The best introduction to Linux I've found is Rickford Grant's Linux for Non-Geeks.
Learning Spanish: I was a miserable language student in school. I had good teachers but total immersion is the only way for me. I finally learned French when I had to use it in Morocco in the seventies. Now there is Fairfield Technologies' The Rosetta Stone Language Software. It is better than actual full immersion in a language because it is so well structured and pedagogically sound. I used it last fall, before spending this February in Xela, Guatemala , getting my teeth fixed and studying Spanish at Juan Sisay Spanish School.
Beginning guitar: Never played before Christmas a year ago. My sister was visiting from California and we traded a few computer lessons for some guitar basics. I spent a small fortune before I found Bruce Emory's Skeptical Guitarist Series of Books. His Guitar from Scratch and Music Principles for the Skeptical Guitarist are outstanding.
Over the years I've raised bees, trout, sheep and hogs commercially on a small scale. Years ago when our children
were at home, we raised a few chickens in the yard. Then our daughter
Edith raised a small flock of Delawares while a graduate student at the
University of Kentucky. Following that, I began to study
and experiment with raising poultry as naturally as possible. The
project has gone well and I am now in my fifth year of raising tasty, wholesome pastured
chickens for sale. The major difficulty in processing chickens
was getting the feathers off in a timely manner. Thus I came to the
study and construction of tub
type feather pickers and
rotary scalders. I need to get my processing streamlined. Scalding is
the bottleneck for now. My gurus in the field of proper poultry
management are Joel Salatin and Robert Plamandon. Joel's book Pastured Poultry Profits is available from online booksellers (though he is not online). Robert is a friends I've never met. He has republished a number of good old poultry books from the days before folks thought they could outsmart nature.
ARRL Field Day 2000 was 24-25 June. Wv3j setup on the divide between VA and WV on Shenandoah Mountain about half way between Reddish Knob and Flagpole Knob. We ran a mixed multi single QRP station in conjunction with MARA/VARA N4XU club effort. Fourteen amateurs operated Wv3j (some of them new ops). Contacts were made on the 10, 15, 20, 40 & 80 meter bands. About half the contacts were done using SSB and the other half CW. The rig was K2 #359. Antenna was an eighty meter horizontal loop about thirty five feet above ground. The K2 performed flawlessly! At least three of the ops are now thinking about building their own K2's.