Wee, radio nerd time! If you’re completely out of the loop, I’m an amateur radio operator, and APRS is a digital radio system that you can read more about here.

Last February, I wanted to get a new handheld, with my focus being furry con usage (which, sadly, was where I used my radio gear the most). I’m a huge fan of Kenwood’s HAM gear, so I picked up a TH-D7AG (I wrote a review of it here), their cutting-edge handheld with, among other things, built-in support for digital communications and APRS. I mostly got it for its dual-receive capabilities, but after reading the manual, APRS sounded kinda cool. I turned on the TNC (think radio-modem), and listened, and found that there was a very large amount of activity in this area. Without a GPS handy, I couldn’t readily see where the other stations were, so I figured I’d wait until I got a GPS unit to play with it more.

Well, this week, after saving up for it for quite awhile, I purchased the companion to my radio, the AvMap Geosat 5 navigation system. It’s extraordinarily hard to find in the US, but it’s designed to be an out-of-the-box counterpart to Kenwood’s APRS-ready radios, in addition to being a very high-quality GPS unit by itself. I’ve been practically drooling over this thing since before I bought my HT, and last month, I discovered that my HAM radio outlet of choice, AES, carries Avmap products!

When the GPS arrived, I was thrilled to see that it even included a serial cable pre-made to connect to my radio, and instructions detailing the specific settings for optimal operation. No guesswork involved, I had the APRS functionality up and running almost instantaneously (I mis-read a step, which delayed me a bit).

Not only does the GPS relay position data to the radio, but it receives the location of other stations and maps them as a special class of saved address. And, unlike the radio, which caps the memorized data at 40 stations, the GPS’s memory is seemingly unlimited!

Today, I set up my APRS gear while driving around for work, and left it running pretty much all day. In the process, I found out that the digital repeater tower (”digipeater”) in this area is connected to a massive APRS network spanning the entire mid-atlantic region! I recorded over 140 unique stations in 10 hours, from states including PA, VA, MD, DC, NJ, DE, WV, NC, and TN. I even had a few text-message conversations with users both near and far. And all of this was over a free, open-ended, completely user-built network.

This, my friends, is the essence of amateur radio, and I think this is the most excitement I’ve gotten from the hobby since I had my first conversation on a local repeater. I’ve heard old-school hams say that packet radio isn’t “real” amateur radio, but after my experience today, I strongly disagree. I simply couldn’t contain how much fun I had with this today, so I had to share

For those who are attending the Western PA Furry Weekend, if you come to the Radiofurs panel, I’m one of the four panelists, and I’ll be talking more about APRS and packet radio, with a live APRS demo.

So, my web design class freaking rocks. The professor is awesome, he’s a young guy and a total nerd, he can’t go 10 minutes without mentioning Star Wars. Since he’s so cool, I restored the content I had previously removed from the site.

There are only six people total in the class, and I appear to be the most web-savvy student thus far. From most competent to least:

-The comp. sci. teacher from a local high school who’s never done anything with HTML, and he may be teaching a class on it next year (o.O), he’s kinda quiet but an ok guy. Catches on quickly.

-The help desk staffer at another college, who dabbled in HTML in 1996, but never did anything serious, and hasn’t touched it since. Again, a nice guy, but I get the impression that he thinks I’m a smartass.

-The Ebay seller looking to make his listings look better. He and I were the first to arrive, and he’s been the most talkative to me thus far, we chatted for a good ten minutes before everyone else magically showed up at the same time. He’s kinda slow to figure things out, but he usually catches on by himself.

-The redneck kid. He’s about a year older than me, and while he’s utterly incompetent at this, he does figure things out eventually.

-Redneck kid’s mom. Yes, his mom. I’m not sure why she’s taking this class, but she sucks ass at it. If she hadn’t been there, we would have finished at least a half-hour early. The professor had to explain everything to her at least four or five different ways, even the retarded-easy stuff (like, which characters to use to denote an HTML tag). I hope she drops out, because she’s dragging the entire class down, and the complexity of the material will increase almost exponentially over the next four class sessions.

Aside from wanting to slap the last two classmates mentioned, it was a great class, and I really look forward to the next 10 weeks. I was also inspired to correct some invalid markup in my site, a project that’s almost done. So, every page of my site now validates if Flash is disabled (with a few exceptions that I don’t know how to correct)

Tomorrow, I start 8 weeks of non-credit web design courses at the local community college. This is the first serious step I’ve taken in many years toward having a real career, and I’m honestly looking forward to it. Why non-credit courses?

-By the time I decided to take classes at all, the semester had already started
-I’m very out-of-practice with this whole school thing, I don’t want to screw up my already-borderline GPA by bombing a real class
-I’m not 100% sure if I actually want to pursue a career in web design, and I’m hoping I’ll have some sort of indicator with these

I’m taking two classes, which are Internet Programming (XHTML, CSS, and introductory javascript from a scripting perspective), and Practical Javascript (in-depth javascript course). The Internet Programming course is actually a bit below my skill level, but it’s a prerequisite for the Javascript class, and since I’m entirely self-taught at this, with a tenuous grasp of CSS at best, I figure I’ll probably learn something in it.

If I decide I like my professor, I’ll probably take a third class at the end of this run, Advanced Site Design, which covers actual design theory and techniques. My tastes are pretty minimalistic/utilitarian when it comes to site designs, but if I want to do this professionally, I need to improve my ability to do the shiny/pretty stuff.

Anyway, the main reason I’m posting this (aside from letting people know what the hell I’ve been up to) is because I intend to show/use my own site for class, and since I don’t know anything at all about the professor, I’ve removed a few of the more controversial pages from my site temporarily. They’ll be replaced when I’m done with these classes, or if I think the professor is open-minded enough to not freak out about the presence of an article on, say, the BDSM symbol, or a gay coming-out story, etc. I also don’t want to scare my classmates, though I’m considerably less concerned about them.

The What Is Furry article in the About section will stay, since it’s linked to pretty often.

Got this from lildobe, instructions are in this entry. It’s almost creepy how accurate this is, I just happen to be aiming for what it says I should. Some of them are kinda weird, though.
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I decided to save these for last, since they’re my favourites.

These were taken at the first meeting of a group of fire spinners at Highland Farm, and will hopefully become a recurring tradition. Fire spinning is what it sounds like, the artistic/dance spinning of a flaming object. Common fire toys include staffs (wicks at each end, spun like a martial arts bow) and poi (flaming balls on chains). More images from the event are available here.

The first image is of my close friend efwolfcub, spinning a double-wicked staff. He also was kind enough to let me use his camera when I forgot mine, thanks Wolf! The second image is someone I don’t really know, I’d never met him before and I forgot to get names.

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Since these are both flowers, I’ll post them both in one entry.

Macro shot of the flower of some sort of wild bunch-berry (I have no idea exactly what species it is). This particular one was all by itself next to the trail, completely isolated from the others of its kind. Obviously, it wanted its picture taken.

This shot completely lined itself up for me. While taking the pictures that Blue Mountains came from, I looked down, and saw this little yellow flower all by itself in a rather large bush of those purple flowers. It was literally the only one on the peak. I figured, it must be a friend of the purple flowers, and it’s just visiting for the weekend. Or, maybe it fought its way into the territory dominated by the purple flowers. Either way, it made me feel a bit inspired to look at it. Maybe it’ll have the same effect on you.

I keep forgetting to update this section of my LJ with my new pictures. Many of you have seen these already, but I like to do this anyway.

This may look intentional, but it was a completely random snapshot from the same peak as the West Virginia Sunset series. Aside from the basics, brightness and contrast, no digital manipulation was performed on this image. Perhaps I shouldn’t avoid taking pictures on cloudy days anymore!

http://www.lupinia.net/photo/bluemountain.php

Last week, I finally bought a new video card, and I’ve been very pleased with its performance. For the first time, one of my all-time favourite games, GTA: Vice City, runs smoothly, and runs well. So, I decided I wanted to start playing it again. My previous savegames didn’t load, but I had made a few modifications at the time, so I simply started a new game. Got to a stopping point I liked, saved the game, and quit. Tried to start it again later, and the saved game wouldn’t load. No error, no locking up, just loading into a blank screen and staying there.

Apparently, this is a somewhat common problem with a large array of causes

This pattern has repeated itself 5 times now, and the worthless GTA mod community stops giving a shit about each game a year after its launch, so no one bothered to decode the savegame format enough to repair it (though there are utilities to change the car spawn locations in your saved game).

I give up. I really love this game, but I’m getting really tired of putting hours of play into passing the same initial missions I’ve done a dozen times already, just to have to do it all again when the file flakes. This last time was particularly irritating, because I went to the trouble of not using any cheat codes (the only “official” cause of savegame corruption stated by Rockstar Games), something that makes the game almost unplayably difficult.

EDIT: And for some reason, my sound card is now stuck in 3D mode, even after exiting properly multiple times.