Faster, better…

Archive for April, 2008

In Maryland the new Democrat Governor raised property taxes the maximum amount. School spending is out of control. My county is building a new community swimming pool and has already built a palatial new county library. Every kid in the county gets bussed to school. Maryland sales tax went up this year. Maryland enacted a NEW 6% so-called “millionaire’s tax” this year aimed solely at the successful people that have struggled to build business here. The business climate here is becoming abysmal.

The State of Maryland has already, many times over, absorbed every tax rebate through increased or new state taxes in the last two years. There is no Federal Tax Rebate. When we get money back it goes into savings. We have to worry about paying fuel costs to drive to work. Heating oil prices were the highest ever this Winter. We also have the increased price of food and the new state sales tax to cope with. Life is back to making ends meet.

Law makers in Annapolis need to take their hands out of my pockets. The money is squandered. There is no state spending discipline. The tax increases are planned for and spent before the assessments are even mailed. That’s how it appears to me.

There is no Federal Tax Rebate. It’s another election year ploy for votes. Take that check you get and put it in the bank. You are going to need it either to pay your property tax bill in Maryland this year, to pay for gas, food, oil,or other new taxes invented by the legislature.

Anne Arundel County is home to nearly one in ten of the those who will pay a new “Maryland Millionaire’s Tax” passed in this year’s legislative session.
Millionaires can afford to live anywhere they want, of course, and this tax could be just the motivator for some of them to move away from Maryland and take all their tax revenue, spending and,,,

read more | digg story

Network Solutions busy tackling a database server problem that has been an issue for over 24 hours. Access to the bulletin board and the blog is not possible as of Sunday morning.

As a Gold VIP member at Network Solutions I was promised periodic updates on situations like this but I have received NOTHING since I called around 7 PM yesterday evening.

It looks like the SQL 4 database is down but the SQL 5 is up.

You should check out my ship watcher’s page. There is a link to the AIS map of the Chesapeake Bay and Baltimore Harbor (thanks to Chesbayshipping.com.) Please contact me if you have questions or use the AIS forum at PopularWireless.com.

Ship watching is fun. Join in!

Visit KAF9830.COM and find out more. I am hoping that CERT and families that need or want two-way radio communication will learn about the real General Mobile Radio Service and try GMRS. GMRS has real utility in a marine community. Families cannot legally talk to a family station on shore using marine VHF but they CAN do so using GMRS. The blog at PopularWireless.com has more information. Contact me if you have any questions.

Apparently the use of Amateur Radio repeater systems is down nation wide. When telephone patches vanished after the advent of the cellular telephone suddenly the use of Amateur repeaters stopped.

Repeaters remain one of the best ways for local Hams to stay in touch to enjoy the fraternal experience having friends in the hobby offers. We do not do enough of this in my Maryland county and perhaps other places in the USA.

Calvert County, MD offers excellent repeater resources. There is the single club repeater of the Calvert Amateur Radio Assn., the larger interconnected N3PX repeater systems, and the repeaters available in Anne Arundel, St. Mary’s, Charles and Prince George’s County. We have to all get together, talk together, and serve together otherwise we are at risk of balkanizing our disdaster planning efforts with every county.

Hams need to get back to clubbing or interacting on the air locally. We’re too disconnected and I fear we are losing our identity of a cohesive mature group of potential emergency communicators that our county’s think they can depend on in an emergency.

Calvert has an exciting system of interconnected repeaters that connects all three Southern Maryland counties. Individual clubs have their own repeaters to connect members. We are not using any of them as often as we should. Our systems can provide the kind of support counties want in a disaster. using them day to day just to remain friends, compare notes, and brag about our own stations means we have practiced using the systems and understand the capability of each.

Are you a ham in Calvert County, MD? You can find me scanning UHF and the N3PX UHF repeater in Lusby. (It’s just easier at my QTH since most antennas are UHF because of my interest in GMRS.)

Amateur Radio is an exciting hobby and promoting it through the active use of local repeaters has always been a priority. Let’s do it! Not enough of us are on the air meeting each other. Club meetings are hard to make for everyone. Let’s get acquainted.

Look, I know from personal experience in California having been responsible for a RACES team at a police agency in a county that used resources from MANY CLUBS and repeater groups that communication and cooperation amongst the Hams is essential to any disaster organization they might claim to be a part of. To get there we have to talk. Turn on your radios and meet your next door neighbor,

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My sister keeps a rabbit.

I have been blessed with a green-cheeked conure that can say my name! He will soon have his own page on DougWeb. His name is Baby. Every morning, as I get ready for work he hollers, “Doug! Doug!” Thanks goes to his favorite human my spouse Eileen.

A spammer used a dougweb.com address as the return address in various types of spam message sent out over the last week. As a result, my email client was deluged with hundreds of failed delivery messages, threats, and curses.

I do not send spam. Spammers spam. Spammers harvest email addresses from websites and spam.

Only an analysis of your message header can tell you who really sent the message. None iof the messages came from dougweb.com.

Mowing..I need to be mowing.

A list I have always carried in my brief case or had posted in my office. Inspiration for me and hopefully for others. Swiped from great co-workers, great bosses, and great books.

• Knowledge is everything.
• Project creep is the enemy of done.
• Always under promise and over deliver.
• Never wait for an answer. Just go get one.
• Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
• Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it all all.
• Always have your ducks in a row.
• Fight entropy.
• Faster, better, faster,better.

Weekends Yeah!

I took the header pictures with my digital camera. These are from the immediate area around my home. There are a couple of shots of Eileen on the beach. We are just 800 feet from the Chesapeake Bay and loving it.

I’m fed up with the so-called news site Newsmax. I don’t visit anymore. Once they have your email address all you get is more and more garbage. You can’t vote in their polls unless you verify your email address. Once you verify it you are forever on their spam list. When they first appeared I was impressed., but they are a long way from being anything more than a sleezy marketing and sales organization and I don’t care who on the right supports them. Blecch.

Network Solutions had  one this evening. The database server went down causing the blog to fail.  Looks like it is back up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Saw Hairspray in D.C. tonight. Great play.

There may be hope for traffic safety in Maryland. Even during the daily Maryland Tailgating Olympic Trials I actually witnessed a small red sports car with Maryland delegate plates going the SPEED LIMIT. (Thursday afternoon on Highway 4 in Calvert County, MD) Not five or ten above but the SPEED LIMIT. One can only hope Annapolis may finally understand that the greatest threat to Marylanders remains the average Maryland driver. There are too many dead and maimed on Maryland roads and highways. Oh yes and the driver was NOT throwing litter or lit cigarettes from the vehicle. At last an example setter.

http://www.citrusheights.net/home/index.asp?page=735

Does this blow your mind or what? Steve Miller with SHORT gray hair.

Steve Miller rocks.

All the high schools in Citrus Heights have FM stations right Steve?

The Boss wants to get together on-line for a virtual reunion. Sounds cool to me.

Did all ex-KVHS’ers know our own STEVE MILLER is now a MAYOR. My goodness what else has happened?

Monitor the blog. Let the Boss know you’re out there.

Is it just me or is the blog as slow as its ever been despite the upgrades?

Time to head home. Another productive day at the ham factory.

Blasting out of here at 0545. I’m faster. After one cup of WaWa cofee I’ll be better.

Does anyone have a clue how to determine the path to mySQLdump and mySQL at this web host?

I created DougWeb in 1995. Way back at the beginning of the Internet. Before modern Internet time that’s for sure.  Then it was a place where I could post my resume, deal with issues in my community like graffiti and neighborhood problems, my pets, my spouse. It was and  remains one of those old sites that has a personal twist to its point of view.

Thirteen years seems like an eternity given how technology has changed. Then I was just leaving the world of FidoNet having managed a FidoNet hub 161/200 and node 161/911 (The No-Name Yet Genealogy BBS).  That was in the early 90′s when the 8086 was king and 9600 baud was possible with a modem that set you back over $400.  Remember the US Robotics Courier HST?

I want to bring it back to life in the 2000′s so my friends and relatives have some idea where we have been and perhaps where we are going. Eileen and I are living now in the land of exorbitant property taxes, excessive litter, and unfriendly government.  Graffiti is even on the rise in my area.  What a mess we are compared to California. Maryland’s saving grace is its beauty, and if I can keep up with the litter control in my area even the roadways look as nice as the Chesapeake bay does.

Just as DougWeb looked at BART, graffiti, local government, and conservative views so shall it now in 2008. We might even go back to doing an occasional restaurant review.

I have a new personal blog at DougWeb.com