NEW FAMILY

Sorry if I have been away a while - but we had a death in the family and it really slowed things down around our little hacienda.  The odd thing is that God seems to close one door and open another around the same times - giving you a new path to walk, a new place to work or be as it were.

   45 years ago my Dad died.  My adopted dad actually, and the next day my future son was born.

Now that may sound a bit confusing considering I did not know the lovely woman who gave birth that day.  But I was to meet her and marry her some 10 years later.  The same son took his life in August this year - and again within 24 hours prior to that my research to find my birth parents had taken a leap and I had found  my birth father.   Odd that it worked that way but again its part of big picture I am sure.  Then a few weeks later we found what would turn out to be a distant cousin on my birth grandmothers family - and she by email put me in touch with a closer cousin - who actually knew my birth mother.  Today I expect to get pictures in the mail (snail mail) of my mom and be able to see her for the first time since I was taken from her at 4 days old - over 61 years ago.  Am I excited ? Sure!  I talked to this closer cousin on the phone and then to a niece I never knew I had and then last night to an older brother - and everywhere I go (by phone or email so far) they are genuinely glad to visit with me and share stories of my missing family.  My adopted father died in 1969 when I was just 16 - but my birth father died in 1990 - its a shame that we could not have found him sooner.  I also have an older sister,  My birth dad was in the Army during WWII and Korea - and married another woman in the early 1960s - and adopted her children.  It appears he had lots of love to go around and would have welcomed me if he could.  These other children are also mostly deceased and the trip thru Ancestry.com to find them was a real roller coaster - finding you who have always been an only child have a brother or sister - then tracing them to find out they were nearby but have died from this or that is a bit of a bitter sweet thing.   However I do feel enriched knowing I have more family - and that they can share the history and ups and downs of the group with me today.
 
   All I can add in closing is that if you have a missing family or family member - please start getting back in touch with them as soon as you can. Even if they reject you - you will have the satisfaction of trying and doing it - and most likely they will at least be interested in connecting - and could be glad to see you.  After all this time with no siblings it was a real hoot to talk to my older brother on the phone - to see the resemblances in his pictures and the way he talks - we even worked in very similar areas of expertise and both appreciate many of the same things in life.

This is a picture of my birth father at a lake in the mountains somewhere. Colorado, California, Washington?  If you have an idea of where this is - please let me know. It was probably taken in the late 1930s or 1940s.  

PCFIXES.COM GETS A FACELIFT

My oldest website - which started over 20 years ago - is getting a facelift.  

Well, to be completely accurate it is much more than that - quite a overhaul in fact.  What was started as a convenient set of links and helpful tips back before Windows95 came out has grown over the years to be an confusing and cluttered mess. Then for most of the last decade or more it got very little attention and has as a result many out of date links and is in sad need of an update or proper burial.

   Like the mechanic who seldom fixes his own car, PCFIXES.COM got little attention as I felt it was more important to work on sites I was building for other people, and those that were pet projects of mine. I keep thinking I would get around to it - sooner or later, but did very little with it over the last few years at all.

   Recently, in studying how to better rank sites online with Google, I found a funny and unexpected thing to be true. Some of my older sites had better ranking (probably due to age - surely not due to changing content) than any of the newer sites.  Yes, I do know that older sites are supposed to have a better ranking than new sites - but we are talking about new sites which are a few months old versus sites with 3 years or more online.  Here I am talking about a newer site (maybe 18 months old) and my older sites of 10 years or more.

  PCFIXES.COM, even with the bad links and out of date advice, was still considered useful and having good content (maybe?) and so it was showing some good ranking.  I first saw this when a local younger fellow pointed out a site of mine offering free advertising to him was useless as it had no page rank. Ok... err... well..  my dog is bigger than your dog..
    Heck.. what is page rank and is it even something a small site can obtain? I hit the Google and studied and tested and found sites like MOZ and others and learned a bit more about page rank. I found then my old trusty site had a page rank of 3 - and it had some popular pages within with page ranks of 0 to 3 also.  I was a bit surprised to say the least.  So I put links to some of my new sites in the PCFixes site - and that has helped their placement in search engines some.  As PCFixes has lots of links and that is part of its scope its a natural to put some links to my other sites there and does add to the content.
    Google is basically going for quality - they want a site to be ranked higher if its a quality site - not just one that is artificially higher in popularity.  I think this is a great way to be - and though its complicated to measure and do - they are doing a better job of it each time they revise the algorithms they use to rank with.  I find it odd but telling in a way when I can search with the same keywords and find a site as on the first page in Bing and its page 11 or 12 in Google.    Bing is trying hard to be popular - but last I read, Google still gets the main share by far of all searches.  The TV commercials about Bing vs Google seem to show Bing is as good as or better - but I find it depends on how you search and what it is you search for. Bing may be optimized to look better on popular items - but does not (in my opinion today) do as well all the way across the board in searching for the many other things. Heck, I still use and recommend DOGPILE.COM for searching - they show the top results from a group of search engines and often give you some very useful results.
  Meanwhile - I am keeping the old PCFixes.com site live under one menu button for everyone, and slowly adding bits of the content into the new part of the site - trying to clean, update, improve and shine up things as we go. When finished most of the site should be viewable on smart phones and tablets too.
Wish me luck!

Electric Harley?

Some folks will get on the bike thinking "golf cart" and get off thinking "rocket ship".

I learned today of the newest project (and likely a product) at Harley Davidson Motorcycles - a new electric Harley called the LIVE WIRE.  While this is fairly revolutionary in itself - how I learned of it was even a bit odd.  I get a regular email from the ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS website - usually specializing in news about new components, better ways to do things, new test gear and such. They cater to the electronics manufacturers and designers mostly - but as new products can often shape how we build our projects or how the new consumer electronics will work - I usually give a once over to news from this source.
   Imagine my surprise when it lists the ELECTRIC HARLEY as an item!   I put a bit more of the specifications and a link to the story and some pics and videos on the main site - if you you want to check them out. Impressive and very radical motorcycle. Zero to Sixty in under 4 seconds - so its not a golf cart by the way.. lol

Online Radio & Video Explosion?

     I can remember clearly the first time I was in a restaurant eating lunch with some other IT staff in the big city of Midland and heard some ordinary folks at another table mention "downloading".  I had been doing file downloads for nearly 20 years but had not heard anyone in public mention it.  Back then the Internet was a scarce wisp of what it is now, and an electronic or online BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM or BBS was one of the main ways we shared files, asked questions and played some online games. 
     Facebook was not around, cell phones were rather large and expensive, and Windows 95 was new.  Online streaming radio was pretty rare and video online was typically poor quality or very expensive.  About this same time I did install a fairly nice video conferencing system - the end I put in was about $25,000 if I remember.  It required two expensive high end modems for two ISDN lines with the phone company and a specially built PC with a motorized camera and fancy graphics.  A huge (then) 25" monitor did the video.  The whole rig took a rather large cart to move it around in a conference room. Through it - with a special scheduled call through AT&T we could video conference with another office. If memory serves - it was probably several dollars a minute for the call from the phone company.

    Today a cell phone can do better video conference work.  A laptop and a decent Internet connection is far better than what we had - but again this was almost 20 years ago.   We today see thousands of new videos on youtube every hour.  And anyone can put a video together for nothing and share it.  What a jump from what we had 20 years ago - and so much more than what we could call handheld when i first got interested in electronics in the early 60s.   A nice 7 transistor radio was a couple of weeks of yard work for a boy - and was only AM. We did not have an FM station in our small north Texas town.  But at night we could tune in some grand stations from 600 miles away and hear some real rock n roll. 

    

Compare that now to my newest toy - a USB dongle SDR radio. It can tune in certain types of TV broadcasts in much of the world (not the USA though) and if you use the right software it can listen to from around 30mhz to over 1000 mhz in frequency - catching much in the two way radio and higher frequency ham bands, some satelite signals and aircraft position beacons.  Picture a 14$ gadget you plug into your laptop or PC, and watch to see what planes are in your area - and their direction and alitude - a poor mans radar system. The software is free and the little SDR radios will pick up FM too.  They do more - but that is another story - if you are interested check SDR USB on ebay or look at my article on www.oldhackers.com.