Year: 2013

Magic Antenna?

Magic HDTV Antenna

No combination of rabbit ears, pre-amplifier and fancy Leaf antenna will allow me to pull in the signal from the local FOX affiliate reliably, which is supposedly closest tower to me. This is not really a big deal until football season rolls around in a couple of months when FOX carries one to two games every Sunday. In the mean time I have not given up hope of finding a do-it-yourself HDTV antenna that will do the trick. Last week I stumbled on a neat idea on instructables that looked like it was worth a shot, the Fractal Magic DIY HDTV Antenna. I even had all the pieces needs to make this baby in house.

So yesterday evening and tonight I put this magic antenna together. With just the Mohu Leaf hooked up we get the big 3 networks and their 4 total sub-channels for a total of 7 channels, with the Fractal Magic DIY HDTV Antenna – only 4. CBS and it two extra “really old TV show” channels were gone.

The antenna was magic alright, it made 2 sheets of plain paper, a 10×18 inch piece of poster board, 10 feet of speaker wire stripped of its insulation, a couple of crimp connectors, 6 foot piece coax cable and 2 hours of my time disappear.

Danger! You May Get Lost!

A co-worker stumbled on a couple of rerun episodes of Lost and thought it might be cool to see it from the beginning, so I’ve lent her my box set of season one. But before I handed it to her I attached a big warning label to the front.

Warning Sign

I found a place where you can create your own warning signs or warning labels, but I had to modify one because they didn’t have a TV icon…

33,000 Stories To Tell

Room 309

Just back from Lexington, VA and I have 33,000 stories to tell. Unfortunately you won’t get any of them tonight.

OK, maybe just one: We stayed in room number 309 at the Hampton Inn Col Alto.

Well, because I’m a nice guy, two: On the drive back, a few miles short of the North Carolina border on I-77, the Purple Whale passed the 33,000 mile mark.

Oh Deer

Oh Deer

Instead of going to the state park near Dublin this morning we opted instead to just take a walk around a trail in a city park. We found two caches. One of which we thought we might be the FTF on, but when we found the cache and opened the log book there was one entry with 2 names there dated a couple days after the cache was hidden. Whoever it was that signed the logbook never logged it on Geocaching,com.

We made it to Lexington around lunch and met with Sally and daughter Claire (bride to be), Mark (impending groom), Stuart (her son) and Christina (bride of son) at Nikkos Cafe. Afterwards we caught up with Sally’s adventures with the State Department in Saudi Arabia as the rain storms passed through the area. Just when it looked like we wouldn’t be able to do the 3-1/2 mile Sally Lewis Loop along Wood Creek Trail and back through VMI and Washington & Lee, the skies broke, and off we went. A couple hundred yards into our walk I noticed a rustling in the bushes and spotted this young buck. He eyeballed us warily as we moved along and never took off further.

Live Bait

Live Bait

The photo above is the first hint as to where Donna & I went for lunch today. Here is hint#2 and this is the giveaway! Still don’t know? Email Mark Turner and ask him.

We are on our way to Lexington, VA for the weekend wedding of Claire & Mark. It was just a little over a year ago that we drove to Baton Rouge, LA to see Claire’s brother Stuart get married.

Doing a little geocaching along the way by visiting a couple SC State Parks before lunch. We were four for four in cache finds, we also found the first stage of a statewide multi-cache and picked up a Travel Bug to drag along and dip in our finds.

We got not too far from home when we noticed that we had left the cell phone in the Miata back home in the garage. But it was far enough that we didn’t feel like going back to get it. Then, more than half way to tonight’s stop in Dublin, VA1, Donna realized that the pair of jeans she was wearing was the only one she brought. We fixed both problems at a local Walmart this evening, Donna got four new pair of jeans2 and we bought a cheap Verizon burner3.

About 9:15 the hotel’s fire alarm goes off. Because we are on the third floor and in the middle of the building we took it kind of serious. By the time we grabbed our shoes, me my wallet and Donna her purse, the alarm shut off. Donna called the front desk and they told her that it was triggered on the first floor, but there was no fire. If that thing goes off again and there isn’t a fire, I sense a free room coming on.

1. This is the third Dublin we have been in this year. In February on the way home from Florida we drove through the Georgia version. In March we stopped in the Texas town by this name to visit the Dr Pepper Museum.
2. She says it wasn’t really her plan, but she did need new jeans anyway as her current group are pretty well faded.
3. So now the people who only turn on their cell phone when they want to call someone, have two cell phones. Actually three, but we never did activate that one, we just used it to upgrade our first phone…

Lincoln

We finally got around to watching the movie Lincoln tonight. It has been percolating in the rental queue from some time now and it finally bubbled up to the top. I’m glad that I didn’t really pay attention to American History in school because it sure made the movie more exciting. I was on the edge of my seat when they were voting for that amendment thing. And wow, the hero dude gets shot and killed, didn’t see that coming.

All kidding aside, this was a really good movie. I totally believed at times I was watching a documentary, Daniel Day Lewis nailed it. Plus it was kind of fun figuring out who the actors were under all that facial hair. Some were real easy, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens and others were harder, like James Spader as W. N. Bilbo.