VHF contest and the bands are poor

http://www.vhfdx.info/spots/map.php?Lan=E&Frec=50&ML=M&Map=NA&DXC=N&HF=N&GL=N



The June VHF contest started about 2 hours ago.  Yesterday people were working from Minnesota to the East Coast on 2m via an E opening. 6m has had been hopping as well.

Today the bands are pretty well shutdown in Minnesota. Look at the map (above) and notice that the 6m openings are on the East Coast and West Coast but NOT in the upper MidWest.  ---Argghhh.

http://aprs.mountainlake.k12.mn.us/map

Looking at the 2m APRS propagation map it shows that band conditions have fallen off pretty dramatically in the past 4 hours.

73 de NG0R

A warm Tuesday

At 5pm the home weather station was showing 99.4F. In Minneapolis they were reporting 102F. In St Cloud the were reporting 100F. Cokato (a community near our home) was reporting 100F.

Clearly it is a warm afternoon. Ben has baseball practice and Joe has a baseball game.





Posted from my iPad via my cell phone

LibreOffice errors saving to NAS

With Ubuntu 11.04 and the change from OpenOffice to LibreOffice I discovered an error similar to something I have seen in the past using a NAS with my Linux (Ubuntu) machines.

When I tried to open a document LibreOffice would indicate the file could only be opened in read-only mode since someone else was using the file. The error is misleading because what is really happening is the LibreOffice was unable to put a lock on the file.

In the past I had dealt with this by either tweaking OpenOffice settings or to tweak my NFS mount statements. (I am using a commercial NAS appliance that supports both CIFS and NFS. I am using an NFS client on Linux and have my NAS shares mounted as part of my boot process.)

Here is a nice article that explains how to tweak the LibreOffice startup so that it does not try to gain an exclusive lock on the file:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1645957

5 minutes of searching and 1 minute of updates and I am back in business.

Ben @ Baseball 6/2/11

His first game of the 2011 season






It was interesting to see the kids use a pitching machine for the first time.

Trains on the CP River Sub (Memorial Day Weekend)

While we were camping we did manage to drive down the road a little ways to get a few train pictures.



CP 9678 and 9531 at Maple Spring headed south/east



Soo 4426 and 4601 running what looks to be a local run. This is just south of Frontenac headed towards Lake City.


Amtrak 180, 57, and 505 at Maple Spring headed south/east

The red and white Soo colors looked great. I would be interested in capturing more of those before they are all gone.

Camping at Frontenac

For Memorial Day weekend we went camping with our friends from the Christie family. We typically try to coordinate 2-3 trips per season with both families. We went to Frontenac State Park in SE Minnesota near Red Wing.


Campsite #22 was pretty nice and was a non-electric site.  It was fairly large and had a lot of room. In fact if we had not had a good risk of rain and storms we probably we have put a couple of the kids in a tent since the site had enough room for the camper, a tent, the picnic table, and the fire ring.



We got the two Christie children (Samantha and Ryan) together into a group picture with our three boys (Jacob, Ben, and Joe.) As you can  imagine the kids love sitting still and posing for pictures about 10 minutes before heading home.


We grilled up about 18 kabobs... ummmm... good!

The weather as a little gray and cool early on but overall the weekend was nice chance to slow down.

Rain (5/27 to 5/29)

Friday afternoon when we left to go camping it was raining at our house. There were some storms while we were gone which always makes you feel good.  :-(      When we arrived home Sunday afternoon there was 1.5 inches of water in the rain gauge. (5/27--> 5/29)

Iowa Lightning

I took this nice photo Saturday night north-east of Ames, Ia.  This is my first lightning photo with the Canon T3i.

Weekend rain

While we were gone Friday evening through Sunday evening we received 2 inches of rain in the rain gauge.   That is our first really nice rain of the season. We had been receiving 1/8 and 1/4 inch events over the past 6 weeks or so for the most part.

I think that our garden and berry patch will really be happy about the rain.

Spring Chores

This spring has been cool and damp for the most part. Wednesday through Saturday followed that pattern but when I dumped out the rain gauge there was only .5" here at my house.

Today (Sunday) was very sunny but cool and breezy. Ben and I put the bucket on the tractor, then the mower deck, and finally the tiller. I tilled up the garden while the boys worked on weeding the berry patch. We ended up stacking out the garden with about 18 rows. We planted all but 5 rows which is where the peppers and tomatoes will go once the risk of frost has diminished. (Frost warning tonight... pretty late into spring.)  By the end of the week or early next week they will get planted.  So today we focused on seeds. We also transplanted 40 raspberry plants, planted 2 new raspberry plants, and planted 3 black berry plants.

I would like to see if we can transplant some strawberry plants but we might have already missed that window.  I have about 10 more strawberry plants that I got at the nursery last weekend that still need to be planted. --It is all about time.

I did manage to get a little bit of a bit of sunburn today which is funny because I was wearing blue jeans, boots, and a sweatshirt.

The next two weekend are road trips so it was nice to be able to spend today our in our yard.