- 2024
- Jun
- 9
Pictures from Breezeshooters 2024 Hamfest.
It was raining where I was, and threatened rain all the way to the show - but when we arrived, the sky had cleared and it was a sunny, slightly breezey 71F. Essentially, perfect conditions for wandering the aisles. While I didn’t see some of the things I hoped would show up this year, there was still quite a bit to look at. I spent a couple hours wandering the show before heading out for some lunch.
The usual mix of equipment showed up here, and a few things managed to wander home with me. This is what I saw at this year’s show:
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Next show will probably be the Columbus, OH hamfest, although there are some happening before that. Regardless, I’ll (maybe) see you there!
- 2024
- Jun
- 6
Don’t stay at toxic workplaces.
A recent LinkedIn post talked about a manager style the author calls the “Up your own butt” boss. You can read that post here: https://www.linkedin … edium=member_desktop. You may need to log in to see it.
A position I held several years ago had a direct manager that fit this bill. Everything good was “We,” everything bad was “you.” Blame would be shifted, even if he was at fault.
Shortly before I left, he stormed into a shared technician office and started berating us about someone charging time - in this case, weeks - to overhead. (Overhead at this company was a charge number that you could use when you were just doing general tasks that had no direct charge. Things like setting up new equipment, cleaning an area, etc.) He was going to find out who did this, they were going to be disciplined. Possibly even fired.
He knew very well it was him doing it. He was having a house built at the time, and would go spend hours on site harassing the builders.
He should have been fired for that, as this was weeks of time he did nothing and lied about it. There were other incidents that he should have been fired for, including destroying expensive equipment from negligence.
Unfortunately, it was endemic to the entire company. His manager - the chief engineer - had a severe god complex. He was incapable of looking at something and going “Good work men, you did a great job!” Instead, he would go “I’m a great man, look at what I did.”
I learned very quickly not to go to this man with ideas, he would discount them immediately, and then implement them under his own name.
It was a terribly toxic place and almost drove me to alcoholism. I’m not proud of that, but I got out with the help of a good friend. Bless you Lance, I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.
- 2024
- May
- 30
The Breezeshooter’s Hamfest is next weekend - June 9th 2024.
This is a great local show, and has always offered a few hours of wandering aisles and some “Dayton items without the Dayton prices.” I really need to lay off buying more boatanchors this time, but I’m sure a couple will come home with me. The club had some things they were selling last year, one piece in particular should have gone home with be - if it’s still there, it will!
(The forecast is calling for possible showers. We’ll see.)
See you there!
Breezeshooter’s Hamfest
Butler, PA
Butler Farm Show (Kind of a fairgrounds thing)
625 Evans City Rd
Butler, PA 16001
June 9 2024
8A - 2PM
https://breezeshooters.org/ns/
- 2024
- May
- 22
Finding old wereboar posts in search engines?
While I’ve submitted the site indexes to both Bing and Google, you probably have a better chance of finding something here using Bing, or those sites that use it like DuckDuckGo. For all the grief Microsoft gives us, their indexing system is quite friendly. Submit pages via their console and it goes “Sure thing! Let me index that for you.” and a few days later - there it is.
Google, on the other hand, complains. “You have a redirect! I can’t index that!” Where? It’s a static page with a link on it. There are lots of things in the index queue that were rejected and I’m not even sure where it’s getting them - it looks like it’s own temporary files are being indexed and then tossed out because they’re not there anymore. it complains about invalid pages but give no reason as to why, just that they aren’t.
Regardless, for all the crap - Bing works best if you’d like to find an old post from a search engine. Use https://www.bing.com … =site%3awereboar.com and you’ll get a pretty good list of things here on wereboar. Bing feeds other sites like DuckDuckGo and Yahoo!, so you can use those sites if Bing isn’t to your liking.
If you’d like to stay on wereboar, you can use the built-in popular post page to see an index of all the pages, and how many times they’ve been viewed. Check that out right here: https://wereboar.com … projects/popular.php
And finally, the third way you can “search” the site is to use the sitemap. This one is just a text file with all of the important URLs on wereboar. There are no titles, so this is probably not an ideal thing to use - it’s primarily so search engines can find the URLs. However, if you’d like to see it, it’s here: https://wereboar.com/about/sitemap.txt - and the auto-gen’d XML version lives here: https://wereboar.com/about/sitemap.xml.
While I can’t take suggestions here due to the large amount of spammers, please feel free to connect with and talk to me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin … an-walker-525b41223/ - I’d love to know what you think, and would like to know if there’s something you’d like to see more (or less!) of here on wereboar.
Thanks for checking out my place. See you soon with more goodies from shows and junk I’m working with.
- 2024
- May
- 20
Hamvention 2024 - Sunday’s Pictures.
The last day of the show was hot and dry.
Sunday was a slim day - many of the vendors pack up Saturday evening, but maybe 1/5 were still on the grounds, not counting the exhibit buildings. Lots of reduced price deals and some free stuff were around today, and I still managed to bring home too much. Today’s lunch was Bourbon Chicken and a milkshake - a bottle of sauce managed to make it home as well. In all, this was a good show even if Friday was a bit messy. It’s also the first year I didn’t go through the exhibit halls, but there’ s nothing in there I needed this year.
Here’s what I saw this year on Sunday:
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All three days of pictures:
Friday https://wereboar.com … 24-fridays-pictures/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … -saturdays-pictures/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … 24-sundays-pictures/
Links to all the things I drug home this year:
Friday https://wereboar.com … d-in-my-car-i-swear/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … it-followed-me-home/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … t-because-its-cheap/
- 2024
- May
- 20
Hamvention 2024 - Saturday’s Pictures.
Saturday was perfect. It was about 80F, partly cloudy, and the grounds had started to dry out enough you could walk and reasonably expect to stay on the surface.
And the weird stuff came out as well…
All the vendors that toughed out the previous day were open displaying all kinds of electronic wonders. A steak tip dinner was had for lunch, and it was awesome as always - much better than the burnt burgers and nasty nachos offered by the other venue. We spent about half the day going through the flea market looking for things to take home.
Here’s what I saw this year on Saturday:
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All three days of pictures:
Friday https://wereboar.com … 24-fridays-pictures/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … -saturdays-pictures/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … 24-sundays-pictures/
Links to all the things I drug home this year:
Friday https://wereboar.com … d-in-my-car-i-swear/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … it-followed-me-home/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … t-because-its-cheap/
- 2024
- May
- 20
Hamvention 2024 - Friday’s Pictures.
Friday promised to be a rainy day, and it wasn’t a lie. The RADAR showed rain, and lots of it!
And it was wet…
The line ride was soaked.
But that didn’t stop me from playing in the mud like a happy little wereboar. There were still plenty of vendors open with tents over their wares, and I still brought home way too much. I spent about 4 hours wandering the wet ways, and of course it decided to stop the minute I was finished! I was soaked by then, and ready to go, but Saturday and Sunday awaited.
Here’s what I saw this year on Friday:
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All three days of pictures:
Friday https://wereboar.com … 24-fridays-pictures/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … -saturdays-pictures/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … 24-sundays-pictures/
Links to all the things I drug home this year:
Friday https://wereboar.com … d-in-my-car-i-swear/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … it-followed-me-home/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … t-because-its-cheap/
- 2024
- May
- 19
I’ve had a few questions about the images here.
If you’d like to save a picture, use “open link in new tab” on a picture to get the full size image, otherwise you’ll save the preview. Once the image opens, you can save it from the new tab. You can do the same thing in a gallery. Just as a note, the gallery will cycle into the next post if you keep going forwards (or back, depending on where you are.)
If you’d like to use any of the images or text, they are licensed CC BY-NC-SA. You’re free to copy them, use them, display them, remix them, etc. - as long as you give attribution, it’s not for a commercial work, and your work is licensed the same way. This is barring any images I give to places for use, I follow their license and only ask for attribution.
Attribution is “Courtesy of https://wereboar.com/projects/”
I try to reciprocate on that when I can. I have many things saved, and if I can’t remember where I got it I will say so.
That’s all! Thank you to everyone reading this little pig’s works, and I hope you enjoy what I find.
- 2024
- May
- 19
Hamvention 2024 - Sunday’s Stuff I Didn’t Need (Ok, I’m just buying it because it’s cheap!)
Sunday was much like Saturday, except warmer. 85F and no rain, the infield was dry, and crowds were low - of course, many vendors pack up the night before. All the food vendors were still there, so I hit the Bourbon Chicken stand and took home a bottle of sauce after eating my delicious chicken.
There’s a vendor that always has tables of stuff for a dollar. I always spend a few dollars here, this year I brought home a bag of indicator lamps of differing styles, some packs of mounting brackets, and a couple of oddball alerting devices. The bag also contains some pin jacks from another vendor that were 2 for a quarter, so I grabbed a handful.
I can’t not buy a voltmeter, so this Sabtronics unit compliments the counter I got Friday. The seller claims it works with a bad segment, that will just be a display replacement. The cool thing about this is it has all documentation, including the shipping box, invoices, and correspondence between the buyer and seller. It cost $2.21 to ship from Texas to Missouri in 1979!
The counter is just…a counter. It’s in an odd case. It’s from the 1970s. I have no idea if it works. That’s for another day.
Last is this odd radio. It’s a Ten Ten brand, manufacturing by Federal Signal. It monitors one frequency. Just one. I’m hoping I can convert it to work on the weatherband, which may be as simple and changing a crystal. We’ll see.
That wraps up the 2024 Dayton Hamvention. General pictures of the event coming soon, I took quite a few this year!
Links to all the things I drug home this year:
Friday https://wereboar.com … d-in-my-car-i-swear/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … it-followed-me-home/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … t-because-its-cheap/
- 2024
- May
- 19
Hamvention 2024 - Saturday’s Stuff I Didn’t Need (mom it followed me home!)
Saturday was a good day at the Hamvention. It was warm, things were drying out, and everything was open. A few vendors appeared to have left, but there’s always some that only attend Friday, expecting it to be the big day.
The mix of products has changed over the years. Gone are the big stacks of old test equipment, piles of old radios and televisions, and the endless sea of Watkins-Johnson equipment. CBs have faded as well from their peak a few years ago, and computer equipment is all but gone save for a few “classic” machines and newer hard drives that got replaced in the never-ending “moar stoarage!” quest. Hobby gear from the 60s seems to be common right now, with big radio gear still being common but lessening.
I picked up a few things Saturday:
I picked up this Eico power supply. It’s designed for tube work, providing 400VDC and 150VDC for plate and biasing. There was a second one, not working, and I was going to offer on both but the dead one sold first. Probably for the same thing I was going to use it for - parts.
The little Heathkit meter is AC only, but the meter goes to the middle when it’s turned on. Something leaky or shot, most likely. It was last calibrated in 1995, was used by Southwestern Bell, and the cal house was in Dayton. Kind of a cool thing.
A manual for both items is in order before use.
This Squeezebox Touch was in a box of random devices. Logitech used to have this awesome music player system that you ran on a server at your house, and you could connect multiple music players to it that played streams or your local library. They discontinued it because I guess you can’t sell ads in a service you run yourself. Regardless, the players still work fine and this clean example of one of the touchscreen models was cheap. I need to try it out, if it’s dead then oh well.
The other items are AC line testers. Unlike most, these have 120, 220, 380, and 440 lamps. At a buck each, I bought 3 and will toss them in the toolbag.
That’s all for Saturday, I was planning to (and did) go back on Sunday. I picked up a few more items to take home because vendors were willing to deal so they didn’t take it home. Stay tuned!
Links to all the things I drug home this year:
Friday https://wereboar.com … d-in-my-car-i-swear/
Saturday https://wereboar.com … it-followed-me-home/
Sunday https://wereboar.com … t-because-its-cheap/