Sunday, February 14, 2016

Scanning, Hamfest

     Yesterday, I gave my desktop problems a "lick and a prayer," and went to the Brownsburg Hamfest in the morning, then visited my Mom in the afternoon.

     Mom is well; she needed a longer cord on her telephone to get it where she wanted it, and I was able to provide one.  Her new apartment is laid out just like her old one, but includes better response from the nursing staff.  "Not that much better," she tells me, though they checked in with her while I was there.  If they're at least a little more on the qui vive, that will be a help.

     The hamfest was nice.  It's a small one but there are usually interesting antique items, plus a couple of the traveling/online suppliers are there regularly -- Debco, who stock a nice line of coax connectors (among many other things of use to the electronics hobbyist), and a fellow from Illinois who always has a good selection of books, modern keys, coax and antennas and related hardware.  I bought connectors and coax (RG-8X: most of the benefits of RG-8 but the size of RG-59), plus a homebrew antenna switch, a small stack of late-1940s and early-1950s QST and CQ magazines, and a WW II-era McElroy "Oscillatone" code-practice oscillator in the original box, as nice-looking a streamlined Bakelite item as you could imagine.  (Photos later at "Retrotechnologist" and possibly here.)

     This morning, it's back to the desktop computer.  I downloaded Spybot: Search and Destroy and MalwareBytes on my Surface, carried them over to the (offline) desktop on a thumb drive and I'm in the process of running them now.  This in addition to the somewhat-nannying McAfee antivirus that runs n the background all the time.  We'll see what, if anything, turns up. 

     It has been very cold and my time outdoors has made my right knee and left ear/migraine/trigeminal whatever both act up.  Hotpad helps and I am hoping a nice hot bath will help more.

     (I'm composing this on my Surface.  It's a fine machine but the spellcheck is aggressive and has tried to turn "hamfest" into "Hamlet" -- and just now "Hammett" -- and "hombrew" into "Hebrew" and "hombres." No doubt there are Jewish cowboy hams* and probably more than you'd think, but I have no idea about the provenance of that antenna selector.)
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* Does Kinky Friedman have an amateur radio license?

4 comments:

Jess said...

Once, I had a vicious virus invade my computer through a pop-up that looked remarkably like something official from the proud designer of my sometimes substandard operating system.

It took days, but after hours of relishing the electronic disembowelment of something created by a sick individual, I found peace, contentment and a visceral hate for hackers. May they all be electrocuted by 9 volt battery banks.

EgregiousCharles said...

A ham-radio Hebrew hombre I read.
http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/search/label/ham%20radio

Anonymous said...

I had a free copy of McAfee on a computer, but after the 2nd virus got through I ditched it in favor of Kaspersky. I liked the older version better than the current one, but I feel that way about a lot of SW. They have to "improve" it every year, or why do they have developers on staff? But it seems to be working. Mostly.

Though I did get a virus in January, that required falling back to system restore point.

Cincinnatus said...

By the way, when I've guests that stay too long, I put my Kinky Friedman album on the stereo.

Can we still say "stereo"?