“Integrate WordPress with Twitter and Facebook, so you can collect everything people are saying about your blog in one place.” -MailChimp

Step 1: Open up a text editor like TextEdit, BBEdit, TextMate, etc. Place the following CSS code in the document:

.tickerActivityStories {
	height: 0;
	display: none;
}

Step 2: Save the document as a text file and name it, fb_styles.css (you can name it anything you want, just make sure it has the ‘.css’ extension.)

Step 3: Open Safari and go to Preferences/Advanced. From the Style Sheet drop down menu select ‘Other…’ and choose the fb_styles.css file. Quit Safari and then reopen it.

That’s it. The ticker should vanish from the sidebar the when you are on Facebook.

Note: This only works in Apple’s Safari browser. If your browser supports custom style sheets, then these instructions may work for you. Additionally, browser plugins exist that can do the same thing.

Berlin area
Androscoggin Valley Radio Club
Gorham Commons Park, Rt. 2 & Rt. 16, Gorham, NH.

Conway area
White Mountain Amateur Radio Club
1245 Bald Hill Rd., Albany, NH

Franconia area
Littleton Amateur Radio Club
Rt. 142 1/2 mile east of Main St., Franconia, NH

Hancock area
Canine Alert Search Teams
5 Kimball Rd., Hancock, NH

Hillsboro area
Contoocook Valley Radio Club
Colleague (or Long) Pond off Warner Rd., Henniker, NH

Keene area
Cheshire County DX Amateur Radio Club
Open field @ 4 Winds Ln, Walpole, NH

Lakes Region
Central NH Amateur Radio Club
Belknap County Fair Grounds, Belmont, NH

Lakes Region Repeater Assoc.
451 Pleasant Valley Rd., Wolfeboro, NH

Manchester area
Granite State Amateur Radio Assoc.
Earl Legacy Park, New Boston Rd. @ Wallace Rd., Bedford, NH

Nashua area
Nashua Amateur Radio Club, Wasserman Park
116 Naticook Rd., Merrimack, NH

Portsmouth area
Port City Amateur Radio Club
Stratham Hill Park, Rt. 33, Stratham, NH

Rochester area
Great Bay Amateur Radio Assoc.
3 Mallego Rd (next to Post Office, near Rt.125&9), Barrington, NH

Sunapee area
NHRC Amateur Radio Society
Mount Sunapee State Park, Newbury, NH

The morning began with introductions and brief presentations by,

• Curtis Metzger, Hospital Preparedness Coordinator, NH Dept. of Health & Human Services
• Ian Dyer, State Disaster Coordinator, American Red Cross
• Scott Reynolds, KC2JCB, Forecaster, National Weather Service
• John Wynne, Chief of Communications, NH Homeland Security & Emergency Management

The presentations given by these speakers touched on the status of the Hospital Amateur Radio Program (HARP), the strengthening memorandum of understanding (MOU) between amateur radio operators, specifically ARES, and the American Red Cross in New Hampshire, SKYWARN training and the expanding role of WebEOC, the web-enabled crisis information management software being used statewide.

After being split into groups, we spent the day rotating through four training sessions run in separate classrooms at the Fire Academy. Each session lasted about one-hour. The first session was “Go Kits & Expedient Antennas” presented by Bill Noyce, AB1AV. Bill gave an excellent presentation and pointed out the need to divide your go-kit into several kits based on duration of deployment. Additionally, he discussed some of the antennas to consider when out in the field.

Session two was entitled, “Introduction to Nets, Net Control and Net Management” by Bill Lana, N4COY. Topics included the mission of a net, e.g., message handling, logistics, collecting situation reports, etc. We had a chance to practice succinct, tactical communications during a net and compared this to a verbose, “wordy” exchange.

The next session was, “Welcome to Radiograms” presented by Pete Stohrer, K1PJS, the Public Information Coordinator for the NH Section. Pete spoke about the history of radiograms and the National Traffic System (NTS) before walking us through the correct way to compose and pass a radiogram. I asked him how long a typical, routine message took to make it from New Hampshire to California. Depending on when the message is sent, it usually takes 24 hours or less for the message to be delivered to the final recipient. Also mentioned was that CW operators can routinely pass more traffic per hour than those operating in phone mode.

The last session of the day covered, “NBEMS Basics.” Larry Levesque, KA1VGM, presented a detailed talk and tutorial on using Fldigi — the NH ARES preferred Narrow Band Emergency Messaging Software (NBEMS) package. Fldigi is a free and open source, digital mode, sound card-based, communications software suite available for Linux, Free-BSD, OS X, Windows XP, W2K, and Vista. Learn more about NBEMS.

Overall, the caliber of the speakers, the subjects covered and the organization of the 1st annual New Hampshire ARES Academy was outstanding. It was a day packed with information, learning and exchanging ideas with fellow amateur radio operators. Iʼm hopeful weʼll see future editions of the Academy and I encourage anyone in ARES, or those with an interest in emergency communication to attend.

It was perfectly clear and a chilly 25° as my daughter and I stood outside looking at the Moon. We had a discussion about the size of the Moon and Earth, which in turn led to a discussion about the planets. My daughter surprised me by listing facts about Jupiter. “It’s the largest planet, it’s gas, has no real ground, and a lot of Earths could fit in it,” she said. But what she didn’t know was how long it would take a person to walk around Jupiter.

Putting aside the lack of a surface, killer temperatures and crushing pressure, I explained that all we needed to do was look up the circumference, around the equator, of Jupiter and how fast the average person walks. We went back inside, dug out the iPad and did some research. We found:

Jupiter’s equator is about 439,260 km (272,944 miles).
An adult walks at about 5 (km/h) (3.1 miles mph).

Then some simple math:

439,260 km / 5 km/h = 87,852 hours
87,852 hours / 24 hours = 3,660.5 days
3,660.5 days = 10.02 years

It would take ten years to walk around the circumference of Jupiter. Ten years of continuous walking. We both agreed that staring at the Moon together was a lot more fun.

• upgrading to MySQL 5 (my Mac had an ancient 4.0 version since I’ve fallen for SQLite and haven’t used MySQL in a long, long time.)
• installing MySQL Workbench since the DB tool I had been using wouldn’t work with MySQL 5.x.
• installing ColdFusion on Wheels.
• making changes to my bash_profile to set the correct $PATH since I mucked it up weeks ago configuring Ruby Version Manager (RVM.)
• updating RVM to 1.2.8 (this had nothing to do with getting ColdFusion running but while I’m at the command line, might as well fix it.)

All set. I can start coding!

Not so fast. BBEdit and TextMate, my text editors of choice, don’t recognize CFML (no syntax coloring, text completion, etc.) So I next,

• fail to locate a bundle or extension that makes either editor CFML-aware*.
• install Eclipse instead.
• configure CFEclipse.

Great. But then,

• Subversion isn’t behaving so off to subversion.apache.org to RTFM.
• While skimming the Subversion packages, I end up at Apple’s Developer Tools area and discover that Xcode 4 is available today.

Xcode 4 is downloading now and I’m off to write some CFML. At five o’clock.

*A friend sent me a bundle for TextMate that added support for CFML. Thank you Louis.

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Server name: dixson.org
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WordPress 3.1
Feed: dixson.org/feed/atom/
Theme Name: Genesis
Theme Version: 1.5
Plugins: Genesis Simple Edits, Google Analyticator, Google XML Sitemaps, WordPress Importer, and WP FancyZoom

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

Cocoa Design Patterns

Programming in Objective-C 2.0

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C

Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

and the bible,

C Programming Language

Within a 5 minute time frame contestants, 2 per team, must complete the following:

• Dress in official attire with the assistance of his/her teammate.
• Carry a lobster pot containing 3 lobsters (pre-weighed) to a dory.
• Empty the lobsters into a bucket within the dory.
• The officially dressed teammate goes into the dory, and using the utensils provided, shells and eats the lobsters until the whistle is blown at the 5 minute mark.
• Shells are put back in the bucket and re-weighed. The least weight is the winner!

I have no idea how much I ate. It looked like each lobster was about one pound (some were more, some were less). I’ll tell you this, I felt like I ate at least six pounds of lobster!

I could not have done this without my coach and mentor, Jay. His daily, grueling workouts, hydration drills, and use of banned substances proprietary training techniques enabled me to pull out the win! Thank you Jay!

More pictures and video will be posted as soon as we have approval from the International Lobster Eating Federation (Lobster Fédération internationale de l’alimentation) and the International Brotherhood of Advanced Racing of Food (IBARF.)