Ripples in the Ether

Jason & Jennifer

So the people I work with are taking bets on how long before I bolt in anticipation of my wedding, which is only now a few days away. Well, not everyone there, just a few of the cynical ones. The truth of the matter is that I’m an incredibly lucky guy, and I count my blessings for having a wonderful woman such as Jennifer in my life.

I just finished up The 5000 Year Leap (an excellent book if you care about the U.S. Constitution) and came across a quotation from Benjamin Franklin, in an essay (oddly enough) called Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress:

It is the Man and Woman united that make the compleat human Being. Separate, she wants his Force of Body and Strength of Reason; he, her Softness, Sensibility and acute Discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissars. If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.

I know, a bit old fashioned, anti-feminist, and politically incorrect, but ol’ Ben was right (don’t let the essay title fool you, he advocates marriage…mostly). I couldn’t have said it much better. Jennifer has helped to set me on the path to becoming a better man. The sum is greater than the individual parts.

Anyway, once the good times are over and done with, I’ll be back with some fresh content that’s already in the hopper in draft-mode. Any time now, 4SQRP should be announcing the kit we’ve been working on for a while. I’ve got some blog posts related to that, and a bit more on the most popular topic on the blog (according to search hits); the dual-gate MOSFET. See ya around in a week or two, and we’ll get back down to business.

OK, I admit that I don’t care for a lot of these goofy Internet neologisms like “blogiversary”, but I needed something to get your attention for a boring post like this. I don’t normally pay attention to these things, but I happened to notice during my last post that my first posting to this blog was in June of 2008. This post will be number 90, and most of them have been fairly original content, not just a rehash of something else I found on the web. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the content that I’ve posted and I appreciate all of those who have taken the time to visit the site and subscribe to my RSS feed.

Here’s to another good year of blogging, I think that things are going to pick up in the ham radio world!

I want to apologize to all of my regular readers for the complete and utter lack of content here recently. I know that there aren’t a ton of you, but I do appreciate those who have gone through the trouble to subscribe to my blog.

If you have been paying attention to my Twitter stream, you may have noticed that I’ve been in a nasty funk regarding my interest in radio. I think it got started a few weeks ago with some online behavior between hams that I found extremely discouraging. I’m not going to name names, since I have no intention of trying to stir up hard feelings.

I’ve also noticed an uptick of condescending nastiness from hams online towards those who hold moral, religious, and political views similar to mine. I don’t mind small amounts of these types of discussion in my ham radio content (whether I agree with the view or not), but the level of vitriol has been really bothersome to me lately. Personally, I try to steer clear of mixing these topics with my ham radio stuff, although I have been occasionally guilty of letting a bit of it sneak through at times. In the past, I just ignored the stuff that I didn’t like. But considering the state of the world, right now I just want to get away from all of the negativity and back-biting when I read about radio. However, it seems like all I see lately is exactly this type of behavior. I just don’t have the stomach to deal with it at this point. I guess you could say that I have a thin skin at the moment.

Sitting down to operate or melt some solder didn’t seem to help either. Usually I can sit down with an idea or a circuit and have a lot of fun tacking the thing together and getting it to work. Now, I just don’t seem to have the attention span to get through even a simple build. Perhaps I’m coming down with a case of ADD, LOL!

Add in the stress of my greatly reduced paycheck, uncertainty about my employment stability, and planning and paying for a wedding, and you’ve got the recipe for a bombed out Jason.

I have been enjoying doing other things, such as fixing up our new home, working on putting in our new vegetable garden, baking bread, catching up on reading, and watching the Trail Blazers make their first run to the playoffs in many years.I am extremely grateful that I have other things that I still enjoy, which tells me that this probably isn’t some kind of depression.

I suspect that everyone who is into a passionate hobby or profession hits the wall like this after long enough. I just need to find the trick to recovering the passion. Maybe I need to completely unplug for awhile to give my psyche a rest.

I don’t intend to let this place blog fade. I still have a ton of neat ideas floating around in my head and in my notebook. But I also do not want to post a bunch of worthless crap here about my psychological state that you don’t care about while I try to get out of the funk. So I’ve been silent, hoping to regain that spark quickly. Since it still hasn’t come back, I wanted to at least let you know what’s going on so that you are aware that the blog will be back on track at some point. The question now is “when?”

Hey, I just saw the incoming link from Blazer’s Edge. Hello all you Blazers fans! I don’t post much other than my ham radio geekery here, but I am a longtime Oregonian and Blazers fan. I had the pleasure of chatting with Ben via Twitter, and got him hooked on my other, much nerdier pastime. Have a look around the blog and thanks for stopping by. I might have to unleash some of my horribly ignorant opinions about the team now that I’m getting some love from Blazer’s Edge. LOL!

Last week, I was informed that everyone in our company would be receiving a temporary (but indefinite) 10% reduction in pay. To make matters worse, it looks like we will be taking more mandatory shutdown days in the current quarter; we’ve got five coming up over the next few months. This is also another open-ended cost cutting measure; there is a possibility of more shutdown days in the upcoming quarters. As might be expected, my first reaction was anger and frustration, but I’ve cooled off a bit since then and let rationality replace emotion. The truth of the matter is that they economy sucks real bad, and only appears to be getting worse at the moment. I believe the company leaders when they say that this was done to avert more layoffs. Given the choice between a 10% reduction in pay and a 100% reduction in pay, it’s pretty obvious what the best option is. I still can’t say that I’m terribly thrilled, but this wasn’t entirely unexpected either.

So now the belt needs to be tightened a bit more at our household. Given my personal theories about what’s going on in the world, I seriously doubt that this is the worst that we will see. Let’s just say that I will be extremely grateful if I still have this same job in a year from now. With that in mind, I have been giving serious consideration to getting into the kit-selling business. Not that I expect to ever get rich selling kits to hams, but I really enjoy design and it would be nice to at least be able to supplement my income now that it’s taking a pretty big hit.

Along those lines, one of the reasons why the technical content has been light around here lately is that I have been working on a kit for a well-known QRP club. I don’t know when I can spill the beans or how much I can say about it, but I think it should be an interesting and fun kit for a lot of builders. Keep an eye on the blog for more details about the kit when I’m able to release them.

Furthermore, I have some other kit ideas that sprang from this original design. Those are the ones that I would like to bring to market under my own banner, along with some other unique designs that aren’t currently on the market. At best, it will still be months before you see anything commercial coming out of my lab, but I’m going to do my best to get the ball rolling very soon since I’ve now got a fire lit under my butt. I’m still going to post other technical content when I can, just don’t be surprised if that category is a bit light for the next few months while things spin up over here.

There are times in any creator’s life where the muse takes a temporary leave. This is one of those periods in my career. Part of the problem is my incredibly screwed up sleep schedule. Working 3rd shift is hard enough, but having a large amount of time off that allows you to drift back to a normal sleep schedule really messes with you. During my recent work furlough, I had a horrible bout of insomnia and ended up feeling less rested, not more. Now I’m back to trying to adjust to my normal schedule and not having a very good time of it.

As a result, not much has been happening on the homebrewing front. I’ve got some a few different active projects going on, but haven’t been making great progress on them lately. I have a ton of cool (at least in my not-so-humble opinion) ideas floating around in my head, but it has been extremely hard for me to get the energy to execute them. I’m too damn tired at the end of the day to do much of anything ham radio related or anything else that requires thinking and concentration. However, I’m still having a hard time getting the rest I need. So I have been ending up doing a lot of reading, both Dead Tree and Internet. I’ve also been letting my e-mails slide again, and I sincerely apologize for anyone who has written me that I haven’t responded to yet. Please send me another mail to give me a needed kick in the butt.

The bottom line is that I humbly ask you to bear with me as I work this out. My blog posting will probably continue to be a bit more scarce than normal for a while longer. Don’t worry, I’m not going to allow the blog to fade. This place is like my journal and notebook in a sense…I make it public in order to share the information but it’s also here for somewhat selfish reasons. I’m not going to let it get neglected. Rest assured that I have some interesting homebrewing information to share with you as soon as I can recapture my energy and spirit.

Blizzak's Snow Dog Minion

This is where I get to blow off some steam about this ungodly weather we have been having. Warning: cabin fever is setting in.

The weather forecasters have not been doing a very good job with this one. We got socked with a good bit of snow on Saturday but they assured us that the arctic air would be out of here no later than Monday and everything would melt. Instead, we only picked up another 5 inches of snow last night, bringing our total to about 1 foot. Now they are hinting that this thing could last all week. I don’t have any chains for our little Nissan Versa, because we never freaking need chains around here. I always thought that any valley dwellers like us who get studded tires and chains for driving around here were overreacting. Turns out I was wrong. By the time I figured out I was wrong, all of the tire stores sold out of chains. TriMet isn’t running any bus lines near our house either. So Jennifer and I are stuck.

Cabin Fever

And I have to get back to work. Tek isn’t closing down, so any time that I can’t get to work is eating into my non-existant vacation time. Not to mention that we are making our big year-end push to get products completed. So I’m well and truly screwed. I’m sure my poor manager is freaking out right about now.

Who Needs Fake Icicles?

Just to make sure I wasn’t just fooling myself about the severity of the road conditions, I took Baxter for a walk down to the main arterial a few blocks from my house. Our road is a sheet of packed snow and ice, but I thought that maybe there was a chance I could make it once I got out to the main road. No such luck. Once we got out there, it was hell. There was still a good couple of inches of ice even in the well-worn tracks in the road. No vehicle without chains was making it out there. So Baxter and I trudged back home, tails between our legs.

You’re probably wondering what the hell the Bilzzak stuff is about? Some tire manufacturer has been running TV commercials for a tire they called Blizzak. It cracks me up, because it sounds like the name of some warlord out of a fantasy movie or some mythical snow god than it does a tire. So, in my delusional state, I’ve appropriated the name for the angry god who has visited snowmaggedon on our humble city. Cue By-tor and the Snow Dog.

Oh, and all I have to say about this is:

No, seriously, that stinks. What bad luck. I hope that you get home soon and safely.

…for now.

I just found out that my employer is forcing us into a company-wide week-long shutdown. Most of the company will be taking mandatory vacation at the end of the year. However, since I work in manufacturing and we have a year-end production goal to meet, our “vacation” is scheduled for the beginning of the year. Combined with the company holidays that we have for Christmas and New Year, I’ll be off work for nearly three weeks. I’m fortunate to have just enough vacation time to cover this shutdown, but it’s going to wipe out my vacation time reserve. I had a feeling that this would be coming, so I have been pretty diligent in the last six months in minimising my vacation time usage. Guess I’ll have some time to do some serious solder melting.

The other fun thing that I learned is that our next scheduled merit pay raise has been cancelled. Awesome news. I’m just waiting for the next kick in the nuts to come. Isn’t this economy great?

Someone’s getting a bit greedy.

Well, after a frantic and exhausting weekend, we’re finally moved in to the new QTH. I’m happy to report that the actual moving part of the move went almost exactly as planned. But (as usual) I underestimated the time it would take to clean the old place. We still managed to get all of our stuff moved to the new house and get the old townhome completely cleaned up before our deadline of Monday, 29 September. The lady from the property management company seemed pretty pleased about the condition that we left the townhome in, so it looks like we’ll be getting a big chunk of the deposit back (whoo hoo!).

Now comes the fun of sorting through the remaining boxes that are stacked up in the garage and placing the contents in the appropriate places. We’ve got all of the necessities unpacked and put into place, but there’s still a lot of assorted junk to go through (and I thought that we did a pretty good job of weeding out the unnecessary crap before the move). The shack is about 2/3 of the way to a condition where I can use it, so that’s another bit of good news. Some tragic news is the huge freakin’ blister that I now have on the side of my thumb as a result of driving a 8-foot ground rod with a 3 lb sledge. The first four feet were no problem, but the last four sucked mightily. At least my thumb can rest well knowing that it was sacrificed for a worthy cause: to help craft a new skywire.

I can tell that I’m getting very tired by my flowery prose, so it’s probably time to wrap it up for this update. I’ll post a bit more about my antenna choice in the next update, so stay tuned for that. Once I’m QRV, I think I’m going to focus on operating for the next few weeks just to savor what I’ve been missing for a long while. After I get that out of my system, it will be back to the homebrewing!