We had the general session of our Stake Conference this morning. The plan was to broadcast video and audio from the Stake Center into another building in our Stake and out to the Arbon Branch building about 45 minutes south of Pocatello. The main part of Stake Conference was being broadcast from Salt Lake City and at the appropriate time each of the buildings would pick up the broadcast from Salt Lake, and then switch back to the broadcast from the Stake Center at the end of the Salt Lake feed.

There are still plenty of technical issues to be worked out. But, it was a good conference and I enjoyed hearing from some of our Church leaders as well as President Monson.

After Conference I conducted two ordinations to High Priest, we came home and got a bite to eat, and then drove over to Soda Springs to spend some time with mother. We took dinner over and spent a couple of hours there.

Mother is doing pretty well. Her phone had stopped working and hopefully we’ve figured out that problem. I tried to replace the rope for her flag out front and only succeeded in pulling the rope clear out of the pulley at the top. Now I have to take the whole flagpole down to rethread the new rope. We’ve taken it down before. It’s not hard, just need a couple of people to assist so it doesn’t fall into the house and break something if we loose hold of it.

We seem to really be into Spring. That also means there’s a boatload of yard work awaiting. Ugh.

TTFN!

Today and tomorrow are the Pocatello Stake Conference session. My first meeting is at 4:00 p.m. where I’m playing the organ for the meeting. That’s followed by an adult session at 7 p.m. and a general session tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

After the session tomorrow, I’ll be conducting three Priesthood ordinations, two to High Priest and one to Elder. Then we’ll go to Soda Springs. Mother’s brand new replacement phone for her brand new cordless phone stopped working yesterday afternoon. Very frustrating for her.

Political campaigning is in full swing. Rather, political campaign signs are in full swing. No one really seems to be doing any real campaigning. Click on the picture….

TTFN!

Today was our normal shift at the Idaho Falls Temple. Up at 4, out the door by 4:45, in prayer meeting at 6, shift ended at 11:45, followed by lunch in the cafeteria. It was a very busy day at the temple. I like busy days there!

This afternoon I had an interesting experience. I had my ham radio scanning a radio band when a fellow I know called on one of the repeaters wanting to know if anyone could hear him.

I responded. He said he was up in the mountains with no cell phone coverage and wanted to know if I’d give his wife a call on her cell phone and ask if she had any pillows in her car.

It took a few minutes, but I did reach her on her cell phone. She had just come into cell phone coverage driving down from the mountains back into Pocatello. I asked her about pillows.

“Oh my goodness!” she replied. She said she was turning right around.

It turns out my ham radio friend was up in the mountains on a father and son campout. He’d just been deposited there by his wife, but didn’t get everything out of the car before she left.

He’s now reunited with his pillow.

Ham radio to the rescue … Ham Radio: When All Else Fails!

TTFN!

I woke up about midnight last night and turned on my heated mattress pad because it was cold(!). I woke up again at 5 a.m. to turn it off because it was no longer cold outside. No snow, clear skies, and a very lovely day ensued. I even opened the window in my office / computer room because the sun shining in the window made the room very warm.

I spent much of the day working on a website and got quite a few little issues fixed for them. Tonight was our monthly Pocatello Amateur Radio Club meeting and the topic was solar power and using that to power ham radios. Most ham radios run best on 13.8 volts, but will work reasonably well from about 10 volts to 15 volts. Solar panels have fluctuating voltage, particularly under load, so most of the discussion was about the various ways to smooth out the voltage without loosing very much power. It was an interesting discussion. There have been quite a few recent advances in solar panels and I suspect that the price is going to come down fairly rapidly as the efficiency increases and demand increases.

Nina has been in Pleasant View, Utah this evening at a Church meeting. She’ll be home after I get to bed. We’ve got another early Friday morning on tap.

TTFN!

We’re now having yo-yo weather. That is, daytime temperatures getting up around 60° but nighttime temps below freezing. There’s even snow in the forecast for tonight.

Spring seems to be fairly late coming but, in looking at blog entries from past years, I seem to be saying that every year. Patience is a virtue … enjoyed by few.

I met with my contracting company this morning and got three more assignments. They all have to do with the same website I revised last Monday. So, I’ve spent much of the afternoon working on getting a full working copy of the website on my computer so I can do the work without breaking the production website.

The other thing that has been going on is issues with my ham radio equipment. In late March I saw a very good deal on a new (actually a refurb) transceiver and jumped on it. When I finally got an antenna up and the radio connected, I could find ham radio traffic, but when I pushed the transmit button, nothing happened. I exchanged some emails with the store where I bought the radio and worked through their suggestions. Still no ability to transmit. So, today the unit went back to the manufacturer to get fixed as it’s still under warranty. Maybe by the end of the month it’ll be on it’s way back here.

That isn’t the only issue, though. My handheld radio suddenly stopped working. A week ago Sunday it was working great. A couple of days later it was completely dead. I bought this radio used and it’s well out of warranty. However, the service depot will look at it for $35 and tell me what it’ll take to get it fixed. If the cost is less than a hundred dollars, I’ll get it fixed. If it’s more than that, I’ll look around to buy another unit. I’ve seen the same unit selling recently on eBay for about $120.

So two radios are now on their way in to (hopefully) get fixed. I’m sure hoping the problem with the transceiver isn’t something I’m doing wrong!

TTFN!

Tuesday was definitely a catch up and catch all day. I had two items on my schedule: An Airport Commission meeting out at the Pocatello Airport at noon and the Portneuf Rotary Club meeting at 5:15 p.m. in the afternoon.

Both were very interesting. All of the tenants out at the Airport go through a rate review on a regular basis. Most of those are annual rate reviews and the Airport Commission meeting agenda was mostly reviewing what the Airport is charging several tenants. The airport terminal is going through a significant upgrade and we walked through the areas nearing completion. Much of this is being paid for out of stimulus money from the Federal Government.

The picture with this post is from the Rotary Club meeting. Our program was presented by some folks from Brazil. Click on the picture for more information.

TTFN!

Today I began working on the new contract I negotiated last Friday. It’s fun to be mired up to my neck in diagrams, surrounded by pieces of paper with important pieces of information, and waist deep in someone else’s program code. The first assignment was fairly straight forward, except that it had several interesting aspects associated with it.

• There is no development or test website. Any changes I make are immediately visible to the world. I broke the site several times during the day, so if anyone was trying to use the area of the website where I was working, they had an interesting experience.
• The method for connecting to the website has a very short timeout … around 90 seconds. I spent a lot of time logging in over and over again.
• All of the logs are locked down and aren’t visible to me. Consequently I have no access to any error messages.

In spite of all that, though, the work got done, it looks good, and does what the client wants to have done. I think I’ll be doing some more work on that website, so maybe I need to build a place to do some testing. I had a lot of fun being back in the programming mode once again.

TTFN!

Mothers Day always seems to draw strong opinions from women. Many think that the day is too over-the-top, which is probably true as events for Mothers Day are always planned by men. Nina gave me an ultimatum: Don’t . Buy . Me . Anything . For . Mothers . Day! So I didn’t. A package came in the mail the next day. She looked at it and said, “Here’s my Mothers Day present!” It was a two-dvd movie she’d ordered online. I guess that’s the way you get the present you want on Mothers Day!

She was also quite happy that the gift given at Church to the mothers was popcorn (bagged, popped popcorn) from the local popcorn store. All the popcorn came home … in Nina’s stomach. So that part of the day was very good.

After Church we went over to Soda Springs to spend the evening with my mother. Click on the picture for further details. Actually, we started down the road. Nina remembered something we had forgotten. Oh well, that could wait for another time. Then she remembered something else. Should we go back? “Nah. We’ll use it ourselves or give it to someone else.” Then she remembered we’d forgotten a really important something. We were about 15 minutes from the house, but we turned around and retrieved all the forgotten items. That made us about forty-five minutes later than expected … causing a bit of worry on my mother’s part. She is a world-class worrier. We had a great visit, got her checkbook balanced, had a nice meal, and came back home.

It was a delightful Mothers Day.

TTFN!