David's Blog

The PERFECT Weekend

Feb 2nd and 3rd 2008 was a PERFECT weekend.

It started out on Saturday with my youngest daughter winning her playoff basketball game. That was followed by my older daughter and a trip to Reading PA for a cheerleading tournament where they came in 1st for their division. They then came in 1st out of 27 teams for their level as the grand champion for their level with the highest score.

Then comes Sunday and Super Bowl XLII. It was our NY Giants against the undefeated and heavily favored New England Patriots. In what turned out to be a low scoring first 3 quarters, the 4th quarter made up for it with the Giants scoring a TD to go ahead, followed by the Patriots scoring a TD to go ahead with 2:42 left. What happened next was a drive every Giant fan (and probably every Patriot fan) will forever remember. Great catches and plays by Manning and 5 different receivers with the most amazing play of all being Manning escaping from being sacked to throw a jump ball to David Tyree who caught it against his helmet and somehow was able to hold onto it. Another pass and an easy pass to Plaxico Burress in the end zone to complete the most amazing drive in Giants history.

A PERFECT win to wreck the Patriots PERFECT season to end a PERFECT weekend.

K2DSL is now a General Class operator

After obtaining my Technician Class amateur radio license back in August, I picked up a book to study for the General Class license. It's a much more technical test with more questions on specific frequencies, power, components of receivers and transmitters, antennas and general electronics. I definitely didn't study as much as I would have liked, and I didn't ace the test this time missing 4 of the 35 questions (out of over 480 possible questions), but that is well within the passing level. So at the BARA Hamfest at Westwood High School, I became a General Class Amateur Radio licensee. Thanks to the BARA VE's for randomly picking out a good test for me to take. The asked if I was interested in the Extra test, but I just laughed. That will take some serious studying.

Since getting my license the beginning of August I joined BARA - Bergen Amateur Radio Association - which is a local amateur radio group that meets in Ridgewood, NJ. I also participated in my first contest which was the ARRL 2007 September VHF QSO Party.

CQ CQ this is K2DSL

I have always been interested in scanners and ham radios. Over this past summer I finally said I was going to do it and studied for the first level ham radio license. In early August I successfully passed and received my Technician Class license.

Within a couple days of passing, I was automatically assigned callsign KC2SAU. They allow folks to pick their own vanity callsign so I applied for K2DSL and just received approval. So, on the airwaves, I'm K2DSL.

Old DOS batch commands still useful!

Every once in a while, the quickest way to do something is go back to using an old DOS Batch command. Every time I know I've done something similar before, I can never find where I did it and I hunt around looking. I figured I'd post an example or two here so I know where to find them in the future.

Both the commands below expect a file called filelist.txt to contain a list of file names to process.

Command 1:
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in (filelist.txt) do @xcopy /y "%%a" ".\%%~pa" >nul

processes each row in filelist.txt in the format of:
Y:\directory\file1.htm
and copies file1.htm from a network share to .\directory on the current drive.

Command 2:
@echo off
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in (filelist.txt) do IF NOT EXIST %%a ECHO %%a
pause

processes each row in filelist.txt and checks to see if it physically exists in the current directory. If not, it outputs the name of the missing file to the command window.

I don't know if these will help anyone else, but I know I'll be able to find these examples quicker in the future!

My train derails but I wasn't on it today

The normal train I take, and the car I ride in (along with a co-worker I commute with) derailed this morning. I got an email from the co-worker right after it happened. I happened not to be on the train today and working from home because of an appointment.

They just showed it on TV with 3 cars off the tracks and 2 leaning up against a pole. 150 people reported on the train and no injuries. Here's a link to the first report by ABC on their web site - NJ Transit train derails.

For a change, I was in the right place at the right time.