Dr. my eyes..

Tomorrow I'm going to check out something pretty cool after work. It's a Craigslist find, but that's all I'm going to say about that. At least for right now. I'll have the camera with me so I'll be taking some pictures and if the deal goes down I'll get the pictures posted tomorrow night while I'm still in my deliriously happy stage.

Biggest. Gator. Evar.

On the way home this past Sunday I spied the largest gator I have ever seen in North Carolina. The only problem with this sighting was the gator was in a location that would have been nearly impossible to photograph and to complicate matters further I would have to drive across the Alligator River bridge, turn around, the cross the bridge once again. Worst still there was a sailboat slowly making its way towards the draw bridge and I would have likely been stuck for 10-15 minutes on the bridge. So this gator remains unphotographed. But he was big. Really big. Nine feet is perhaps bordering on the edge of a "big fish story" but I think eight feet is an honest estimation of this gator's size.

I had a great weekend!

We are back from the latest trip to the Outer Banks, and probably the last trip for a month (more on that later). This weekend was unique in that we had our friends Richard and Caroline join us in Rodanthe for Saturday and Sunday (the place was all ours Friday night). Keep in mind that the condo is 890 square feet and 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom - far from a palatial estate where four people could wander and not find each other for hours on end.

In the end it worked out better than I had expected. Kelly and I had the bedroom while Richard and Caroline took what I believe to be the most comfortable fold-out couch in existence (you can't feel the bars under the mattress - really).

I cooked a grand breakfast for everyone this morning, omelets for all along with bacon and sausage. Yum! There were a few problems to deal with on the wireless network next door, but nothing I could not handle (it was just inconvenient to have to deal with that on a Sunday).

I'm rambling on so I'll stop. In closing I hope you had as much fun as I did this weekend (and as much as I hope Kelly, Caroline and Richard had).

local hosting?

Is anyone interested in local hosting? That is you would have a server in-state within a 90 minute drive that would have dedicated 10/10 bandwidth and burst rate to 100 meg (bi-directional)? My company uses what are called Carrier Hotels. These are comm rooms located very close to the bandwidth provider. In these comm rooms (sometimes entire buildings) you have access into the building and access to your locked rack, closet, room or cabinet. You can go in, do what you need to your equipment and leave. It's more complicated than that, of course, but you get the picture.

The thought dawned on me why not set up something like this locally? I was looking at Mac Mini Colo (and, of course, the big daddy, Rackspace - and I don't intend of implying that I would be directly competing with either, in fact I'd prefer to say quite a bit smaller) and I thought "why not just host the device where the bandwidth is?"

There would be a major "got-cha" and that is all devices would have, and only have, a routable IPv6 address. It would be conceivable to set up a hosting enviornment where you could port-forwared from a single routeable to X number devices but having worked with IPv6 I would say it might be cleaner just to dive in and swim with the big numbers. Plus you could still map to hostnames. Granted, some applications would have issues I'm sure, but that is where port mapping and private addressing could come in. Private addressing would also work for someone who wanted to set up a VPN enviorment for remote workers where the VPN concentrator would have the public address and all protected hosts behind that concentrator would have private addresses defined by client.

Anyway, what say you, crowd? If nobody is inerested in this I'll just get a fat pipe of my own at my brother-in-law's house down in Wilson and forget about the rest. If anyone else is interested I'll start to put together a real plan and see where it goes.

My radio arrived last night!

Upon arrival home from work I found on my front porch a box from the far away land of Oklahoma. In the box was one Icom IC-T8A hand-held HAM radio. It's a cute radio, small in size and big on features. The box included everything down to the two belt clips, but was lacking the original documentation which the seller had informed me was long lost. Not to worry though, the seller was kind enough to download a copy from the web and print it out for me. What a cool guy!

So far I've programmed some local repeaters to use at home and work (this hobby will most likely dominate my lunch hours for the forseeable future). It seems my local Youngsville repeater is not very busy (145.11 Mhz) but the Rolesville repeater is (145.315 Mhz). Last night I was listening to the conversations on the radio and I was about to chat with a local HAM who was very close by my home when the battery on the hand-held gave out! The timing was perfect. The seller warned me this radion had not been used in quite some time so I the battery was probably discharged. I let it charge overnight and we'll see how long it lasts.

Will tonight be the charm? We'll see.

radio in hand

Ok, here goes nothing. A friend at work, Heath Roberts, also known as KD4DNX, brought in his Motorola MTS 2000 into work. I had no idea Heath was a HAM operator. As it turns out he has had his license for over 20 years, or nearly that long.

Now it's time to do what I've been dreading: make my first radio contact. I'll give it a whirl and see how it goes. Hopefully I won't make too big an idiot out of myself!

Be it known that I transmitted using my license at 11:59 am, 21 July 2008. Nobody responded. I think that is a good thing!

Saw me a gator!

Today I caught a glimpse of Alligator mississippiensis, also known as the American Alligator. Just like the last two gators this individual was viewed in the water-filled ditch along US Highway 64 between Manteo and the aptly named Alligator River. This gator was a small chap, clocking in around 4 feet in length. Gators in NC grow a lot slower than gators in Florida so I expect this little guy was somewhere around the five year mark, but I really don't know.

I wanted to turn around and snap a picture but we had the hammer down and we wanted to get home ASAP. Next time I see a gator I'll make sure to stop and get a photo or two.

Oddly I saw no turtles on the way home and normally you see so many yellow belly sliders that you lose count. No black bears were spotted either. Or red wolves. But I saw a gator!