I’ve been buying a lot of weird crap on the intarwebs (ham radio crap, obviously) and I’ve spent a lot of time using “Delivery Status” on my iPhone to track the packages. I had a bunch of antenna stuff coming on Friday but I got an interesting message email from UPS that said,

That’s kind of exciting in a bad way. Delivery Status even reports the location of the train derailment to be Wolf Point, MT, which means I can use the intarwebs to get news. The AP reports:

I hate to be mercenary about this but I think this may be one of those times that I have to be present when the shipment arrives and check to see that it’s not all beat up. I think the only thing I can do is reject the shipment when the guy arrives with it. I don’t think this had anything to do with the snow.

Speaking of snow, there were people sledding at midnight, and sledding means lots of screaming, “Whee,” and using other nonsensical interjections that woke me up repeatedly. When I got up at 6AM there was still a lot of snow, but it was raining cats and dogs. I drove to the slush to work, and got there at the usual time but was unusually tired. I hope we’re done with that foolishness.

[UPDATE] For all those people coming here looking for UPS info, my package is back on schedule to be delivered today, 1/20. That means I have to take a day off of work to wait for it, and reject it if it looks damaged. At least that’s how I understand how shipping works.

[Second UPDATE] I got one of my two packages delivered today and it was fine. True to MFJ form, though, (the ham radio manufacturer also known as “More Effing Junk”) it came without a manual. Oh, and I’m deleting the ruder comments because it’s my blog and I do whatever I feel like.

It snows a bit in Portland and it’s pretty miserable when it does. Most often we’ll get enough snow that there’s white bits in the grass but nothing more. The worst is when we get a few inches of snow, it melts to slush during the day and then freezes to a sheet of ice during the night. There’s no getting around in the ice, no matter what people tell you about their winter driving prowess. The weather forecasters are generally useless when there’s snow predicted and I was watching the dire predictions when the snow actually started to stick to my satellite dish and killed my TV reception. Oh, well. We now have snow.

Today’s morning commute wasn’t so bad. The snow was slush and most traveled roads weren’t slick at all. We’ll see how it its tomorrow morning. If I’m lucky, the rain will start early and the snow will all be gone tomorrow morning.

It took a couple days of searching through all the boxes in the living room and basement, but I found my radio and my power supply. My antenna and a tripod should be arriving on Friday and I may even get to put it all up this weekend. So very geeky. I’ve been on the radio a few times and a co-worker even heard me at some point. I’m not sure what this all means other than my cave-dwelling radio geek days are getting closer and closer.

I even skipped going to the gym. The real reason is that I had shoulder cramping, a headache, and I’m old. I did NOT feel like I’d be doing all that much even if I went, so I didn’t. It gave me more time to search for my radio, though.

I spent a lot of time this weekend trying to reconcile my accounts in Quicken Essentials. I went back to my bank records from 2000 and looked at them month-by-month. By the time I got to 2011, something had changed and everything was back to normal. I’m not sure what I did and I’m most ly convinced that the software is just plain buggy. That was most of my Friday evening and Saturday.

I got a call from the urologist on Friday and found out that he didn’t find anything, which is what I wanted him to find and he really didn’t need to stick things in my privates to get there, but I guess he had to make sure.

Other than that there isn’t all that much a guy does during the NFL playoffs besides watching a lot of football.

I’m being very un-hamlike, spending a lot of money on radio gear. In fact, I’ve even bought the wrong accessories for my new handheld radio and it only made me go out and buy the correct ones. I figure I’ve been doing this since, what, 1978, so it’s not like it’s a whim. I have found out several things from my new Yaesu VX-8R radio.

1. It’s hard to use but the instruction booklet tells you exactly how to do more than you ever would need to do (unlike the Chinese POS).
2. I can listen to all sorts of things like aircraft but I need a better antenna.
3. There ain’t no one talking on the ham radio.

I still have to admit that the Chinese POS got me interested in radio again.

I’m really just waiting for my new antenna to arrive so I can get back on the low bands and talk to all sorts of odd exotic locations. I have to buy more cable, and I have to find where I packed my radio away. Hooray for geeky hobbies!

DON’T READ THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE SUBJECT IN THE TITLE.

So, this isn’t the most pleasant thing to read about, I’m sure, but I just wanted to see if I can get this into the google search results and say, it wasn’t as painful as the rest of the intarwebs made it out to be. The worst part was insertion of the probe which felt, well, larger than was comfortable. The numbing of the prostate with lidocaine was only a warm sensation and the actual biopsies felt uncomfortable but weren’t that painful for me. Sitting was uncomfortable for a couple hours afterwards (like while I was driving myself home) but it got better fairly quickly. I only had to lie down and read a chapter of the Steve Jobs biography before I was mostly back to normal.

The worst part was finding blood in my bodily fluids. They warn you that you may see blood in your stool and urine, but they didn’t tell me that even after knowing it would happen that actually seeing it would make me feel a little panicky.

I guess I was a bit of a smartass about the whole thing. A nurse and an ultrasound tech both asked my name, birthdate, and if I knew what I was having done. I replied with my name, my birthdate, and that “the doctor is going to shove something big up my ass and stick pins in my prostate.” I also told them that I searched the intarwebs and they had one opinion (“the most painful thing that could happen to you”) which is not what the doctor indicated. Once again, the intarwebs were wrong.

In any case, I got the biopsy because of a slightly elevated PSA test. Not dangerously high, but it was higher than normal for an Asian male in his 40’s. Since my dad had prostate cancer, my doctor wanted to do a biopsy. Since I trust him (he’s geeky like me) I went in for the biopsy. And that’s my story. Results come later.

I spent most of the weekend sorting through QSL cards. Those are postcards that you send after you talk to a guy on the radio, to confirm that you talked to him. The cards can be colorful or just plain boring, depending on who is sending them. I was just checking to make sure my computer records matched the actual cards I had. My geeky hobby has progressed to the postal service, not just radio.

I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out why my email is sometimes broken. kickstarter, for example, is violating some internet rules regarding DNS, but that shouldn’t keep me from getting email from them. Unfortunately, I have to call in some help on this one. I’m not sure what all is broken.

So there you go. More geekery over the weekend. I need a vacation from my weekend.

My name is Todd and I am a ham radio operator. It’s been two days since I’ve been on the radio.

For about ten years I’ve volunteered during the Portland Marathon as communications at an aid station. I used to have a handheld radio that I only used for that, but it was stolen during a break-in a few years ago. Since that time I’ve been borrowing my buddy Greg’s radio every year. Every year I think about buying my own radio, but I only really use it once a year.

About a month back I was talking about this and an old friend gave me a brand new Chinese-built dual-band ham radio. What a pile of shit. Honestly, the radio is shit, the manual is shit, the shitty thing talks to me in Chinese, and you can’t even set it up without the shitty Chinese software. The settings are all in Chinglish and are incomprehensible and if you select the wrong thing the radio won’t work. It took hours and hours of trial-and-error to get it actually function as a normal radio. I spent $80 on accessories and I’ve had fantasies about hitting this thing with a large hammer until it was  a pile of Chinese dust. I really don’t even want to give it away because anyone I hate someone enough to give this shit radio to is someone I’m not talking to.

On the plus side, all the frustration from this Chinese POS has got me interested in radio again. I spent $1200 on ham radio equipment the other day. I bought a Japanese-designed Yaesu handheld radio with a bunch of accessories. I also bought an HF antenna that I’m planning to put on the roof so I can start talking to other countries again. I even downloaded a bunch of Morse code training software.

I’m old now and women were never interested even when I was younger, so I’m going to buy some pants with a waistline that comes up to my nipples, change to a nice comb-over hairstyle, and get back into ham radio 100% in 2012. Cool plan, right?

I’m hoping my mom doesn’t get sick as badly as I did but so far she seems a lot better off than I was when I got the crud. She slept all day but didn’t have a fever and seemed fairly good otherwise. It also gave me an excuse to take a day off from the gym, which is something I should have had the sense to do anyway. Ease my way back in rather than try to kill myself right off. I did have the ‘flu after all. I felt kind of logy all day long.

I may have done it to myself by staying up too late and by eating “loco moco” for lunch. I kept hearing about it on Hawaii Five-O so I had to try it. A bunch of rice topped by two burger patties, a fried egg on each, covered in gravy. All the big eaters who usually go double what I do stopped halfway through but I hoovered my  whole lunch. My stomach felt kind of strange but I’m not sure it was because of the food since I felt bad even earlier. I think it’s the coffee at work and the mind control drugs contained therein. Actually, they probably don’t wash the sludge out properly, but it’s more interesting to think of conspiracies sometimes.

I had to work on January 2nd and I think my company is the only one who didn’t get the memo that the 2nd is a holiday. Even the gym was closed. Well, today I went to work AND the gym. I even pooped a fairly normal poop (and I won’t go into how the ones from the past few days weren’t quite normal.)

In any case, I’m back to eating solid food with color. The BRAT diet (bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast) is quite boring and pale and I’m happy to be eating other things including all the stale cookies I’ve been ignoring. Actually, we GAINED more cookies, some Bergers from Baltimore, and I’ve been eating those before they go stale.

Now it’s time to hit the hay. I finally noticed that my sister brought back one of my “old” computers and it’s now in the basement as one of the servers. Getting it to do my bidding took longer than I thought and it still isn’t 100%. Oh, well, there’s always tomorrow.

Our family never did celebrate Xmas that much (not being Xtians) and nowadays I really only get gifts for my sister and brother-in-law and don’t expect all that much either. I did get myself a bit of a present this month when I got a new car, and I also got a t-shirt and some really good cookies. But what I really got on Xmas day was a fever, chills, and diarrhea. I suppose the true gift was that I didn’t get the vomiting that a lot of my co-workers said they also got. The fever broke in 36 hours, but five days later I’m still not seeing any normalcy in my digestive system. I even had to call the doctor for a prescription for anti-diarrheal medication because the spaghetti last night made me wake up every hour or so to go to the bathroom.

So there you have it. I have had fairly bad diarrhea for five days. I’ve eaten almost nothing in that time. AND I HAVEN’T LOST ANY WEIGHT. I’m taking this to mean that I’m not dehydrating, and I hope I’m right. One of the only gifts I got for Xmas (the cookies) are probably going to be thrown out because I can’t eat anything solid. (Who am I kidding? I’ll eat them even if they get stale.)

Oh, and while I shouldn’t be worried about mileage on a brand-new car, my Prius gets the SAME mileage as my old Honda Civic Hybrid. It should be about 10MPG higher, but you know how it is.

I knew getting a Prius is kind of douchey. Well, not douchey, but probably kind of self-important. Well, maybe not self-important, but it also lumps me in with a lot of whackadoodles and I’ve sure found a lot of them on the intarwebs. I’m not sure why I spent the last hour reading arguments about why Toyota should be sued because you can’t run the Prius with NO GAS, just like it says in the manual. Sure it’s a hybrid, but it’s a frigging gas-powered car. You put gas in, you go. No gas, no go. Pretty simple to me, but there are nut bags arguing about it until they’re blue in the face.

That’s why I liked having a Prius hybrid. I was supporting the new technology with my wallet but I wasn’t telling everyone that I had an ULTRA SPECIAL CAR. Just a Civic with a small hybrid sticker that you’d have to look for if you wanted to see it.

Ah well. The real reason I got the new car is so I could play with it, and I am doing that. And by play I mean commute to work while distracting myself so I don’t think about work. Maybe if I just stream Pandora while I’m driving I won’t worry about all the other Prius nut bags. Which I could also do by staying off that one web site where they all were. So many easy solutions to this problem.