June 30, 2008
Field Day 2008
Another ARRL Field Day has come and gone. This weekend was exhausting, we finished setting up our three transmitting stations at the Union City ARES/RACES Field Day site at around 12:30pm local time, and started working stations at around 1:00pm.
Band conditions weren't the best but we made a decent number of contacts from around the Bay Area up the coast to Alaska and BC, Canada, and as far east as Maine. I also passed by the Palo Alto Amateur Radio Association Field Day site at the usual spot in the Bayfront Park at Menlo Park.
After 24 hours, it was time to tear down our site and get some well-deserved rest.
June 20, 2008
Jeth Vader... (updated)
OK, seriously, I've never embedded any YouTube videos to this blog before, but after visiting Gizmodo this morning, I just found this clip to be sooo funny.
Update: So I found out, this was Eddie Izzard. And someone made the Lego stop motion animation. Excellent work, I say.
June 17, 2008
PC Reminiscing
When I woke up this morning, I started checking my email and going through my daily routine of checking my usual websites. Then I started thinking about how much computers have evolved since I first learned BASIC programing on an Apple ][e clone.
My very first computer was a Commodore VIC 20, with a whopping 5Kb of RAM and a cassette tape drive to store programs on. It was a bitch trying to purchase software for that machine.
The next machine I had was the Apple //c, a desktop machine that was designed to be "luggable", it came with 128Kb of RAM, had a built-in floppy drive, and had a matching 12" green CRT monitor.
When I started college, I started learning other programming languages such as Borland's Turbo Pascal, COBOL and PDP-11 Assembly language. The university that I went to was then an MS DOS shop. Which forced me to get my very first IBM PC clone. It had a 1Mhz 8088 processor with 640Kb of RAM and a 10MB Hard Drive. It was awesome. I ran my BBS on that machine on an internal 2400bps modem.
From there, I soon progressed to faster machines. The next machine was a 386SX-16. 16Mhz!! Wow! With 4MB of RAM. Multi-tasking was suddenly possible with OS/2 or DesqView or MS Windows 3.1.
From there, it was a pretty quick move to the 386DX-40, then onto a 486DX4-100. The DX4-100 was the last desktop IBM PC clone that I had. Since my dad bought me a nice Compaq laptop that had a Pentium 200MMX processor with 256MB of RAM. From that machine, I moved to a Dell Pentium III 500Mhz laptop, which was later changed out for a P4 machine.
Soon, I got tired of popups, crashes and the threat of virus issues, as well as the fact that I was getting back to photography with digital photography starting to pick up speed. I bought my first Apple computer since the late 80s. A Titanium Powerbook G4 with a 1Ghz processor and a Unix based operating system. Since then, I've been using Macs, upgrading to a 1.5Ghz G4 machine later, to my current machine, an Apple MacBook Pro with a 2.16Ghz Core2Duo Intel Processor.
From a 1Mhz processor at around the mid-80s to today's 2.16Ghz Dual-Core machines, with processors still getting faster and faster. My current video card has more processing power and memory than my first, heck even my fifth machine. And there are no signs of slowing down.