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Hugh Blemings's Blog, A Diary and Miscellaneous ramblings
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Sun, 27 Feb 2005
The weekend didn't go to plan. We left on Friday afternoon to go to the church camp but Lu fell ill about half way there. Rather than camp as we'd planned we detoured to her mums coast house and spent the evening in real beds at least. Lu though was quite unwell so off to the local hospital first thing Saturday morning - diagnosis was a very nasty tummy bug. Rachael and I drove up to the campground where the folk from church were and dropped some stuff off. Had a hurried lunch, was nice to see everyone but a bit of a blur. Returned to fetch Lu and drove back to Canberra. Rachael had a stay at Grandma's and Lu and I basically collapsed for the next 24 hours.
In reviewing the week I appear to have turned into an exercise junkie. The relapse of the chest cold I had a month or so ago has meant I haven't ridden since last Wednesday - well over a week ago now. Man, I miss those endorphins. Probably a good sign for someone that was never that "sporty" in school though :) Going to take it easy for a few more days and hopefully be able to hook up with the mob on Wednesday.
This week also marked a return to part time studies at the ANU I'm doing two units - one, COMP6464, on High Performance Scientific Computation the other, COMP6311, on Software Analysis and Design. The former is already looking great, the latter I think will take me longer to get into being more "pure" CompSci. Both units are scheduled along with undergraduate courses so they tend to be during the day, has decimiated my weekly routine so am going to give it a couple of weeks then see which lectures I can skip to restore sanity to my work routine.
Monday was particuarly cool - was reunited with my study buddies Aaron and Kris from last year, great to see them and catch up. Aaron has been busy being a Dad for the third time, Kris has been travelling all around South America, as one does :) Pleasant surprise too to find that Nick Piggin is doing both COMP6464 and COMP6311 and Tony Breeds is in COMP6311.
Gonna be a hectic study schedule though, first assignment has already begun form COMP6464 - means playing with vpython which looks pretty cool. We have to write a simulation in a mixture of vpython and C, will be cool to do some optimising on the latter, perhaps I can borrow some time on a system at work and really make it fly :)
Last weekends trip to Wyong was fun, felt varying degrees of blah thanks to the aforementioned cold but that was forgotten for the most part courtesy of the fun had. Bought a few bits and pieces (read: junk) and after some deliberation, rather to Michael's amusement I think, a new radio for the shack at home. Had done quite a bit of reading up of the reviews at eham.net on the Yaesu FT-897 and when the vendors had them discounted by AU$300 seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
One of the attractions of the FT-897 is that it has a very similar menuing system/UI to the FT-817 that I already own. Main differences being rather higher output power (100W on HF, 50W on 2m and 20W on 70cm) and, basically, more knobs and buttons to make it easier to drive quickly. Picked up a 13.8V/20A switchmode power supply to run it as well as some Anderson "Powerpole" connectors so can have some sort of order in my DC connections. All works nicely nicely, talked to two stations in the Ukraine this afternoon (UX0IB and UR0MC) on 20m (14MHz) with 70W into the vertical on the roof.
Have been tending to leave the rig scanning the local 2m and 70cm repeaters when I'm in the office so have had a few nice chats with local ham friends too. Nice to be back on air :)