Field Day, Failure and Food

I have been extremely busy in the last few weeks, looking for a job, both within IBM and outside the company. I have certainly been focusing more on looking inside IBM while I'm still there, though.

This past weekend I also participated in the annual ham radio Field Day event with the Orange County Radio Amateurs. Saturday night, I operated for several hours on 20 meter phone. You can see the tent I was in, at the far left of the picture on the right. I had hoped that I could put a link to last year's post describing Field Day. It looks as if I didn't put much effort into describing it at all, in part because I didn't really participate much last year. Basically, it's a contest in which clubs and individuals attempt to contact as many other stations as possible during a 24 hour period. During each contact the parties exchange their call signs, locations and the classifications for the contest. For example, our club callsign is W4Ez, our location is North Carolina and we operated as 7A. This means that we operated seven stations simultaneously (unless too many people were sleeping). OCRA also operates every year using QRP, which means that we are trying to simulate emergency conditions and only use 5 watts of power from batteries. We can charge the batteries with generators, but we cannot operate using generators. It's a lot of fun, but it can be frustrating, because it means that a lot of people can't hear us, at least during this part of the sun spot cycle. Another cool thing about Field Day is that everyone, even non-hams, are allowed to operate on all the bands.


The other main component of Field Day, as far as I and many other people are concerned, is food. My dad is actually in charge of food for OCRA, which is amusing to me since it's the only time of the year that he ever cooks. He does a good job, with my mom's help. He makes hot dogs and hamburgers (salmon, Boca, turkey and beef) on Saturday night and pancakes and sausage (with real maple syrup) on Sunday morning.

My Canon S300 camera started dying after the picture on the left was taken. I'm not sure what's wrong with it, but the display shuts off and it refuses to move the lens. It's very frustrating, because I don't really want to spend a lot of money right now and I had thought this was a very nice camera. It's never been dropped. The sunset actually got a lot more spectacular after this, but it already looked great in this picture.

I have now revised my resume 2o9,937 times.


I've been to ACME a couple of times lately. We went there for brunch to celebrate Father's Day, accompanied by JJ and JA. Dads eat for free on Father's Day, so we couldn't miss that. We also celebrated my parents' 39th wedding anniversary Sunday night. JJ and JA gave a me a "General" hat, because the Saturday after I got back from the coast, I passed the General exam, to upgrade my ham radio license. I neglected to mention this in my last post. Now I can legally operate on HF bands anytime, rather than just on Field Day.

Today, a bunch of us went to China Express for lunch, to take out LD, whose last day at the company was today. I believe it's owned by the brother of the owner of Eastern Lights (formerly the Mandarin House). It's very good. I had chicken and plum sauce, which is no longer on the Eastern Lights menu, so I hadn't eaten it in many years.