Paul Kimbrel's Musing

Yep. I’m crazy.

Certifiable. My antenna came down during the ice storm earlier this month and I haven’t been able to get on the air. Well, the weather was nice today and I had talked about putting the antenna back up. My wife suggested that today would be perfect before it got cold and nasty again.

Yep. Me. On a ladder. Working above my head. Outside.

Yep. Crazy!

But, I did it! I’m darn proud of it, too. See, I don’t really care for heights, let alone ladders. Gravity and I don’t get along too well. Tonya gave me moral support and held the ladder while I was up there.

There were only two moments when I really wanted to click my fingers and be off the ladder, inside, and sitting down. Once when I was soldering the dipole leads (the main wires going from the house to the trees) onto the ladder line (the wire that goes down and into the house). I decided to try out my new butane soldering torch. Here I am, 5,000 feet (okay, 15 feet) off the ground, soldering with FIRE in such a way that the any extra solder would come down on my coat.

Kids, don’t try that at home.

The second moment was when I went up the tree in the back yard to make the final attachment. The ladder wasn’t as secure as I’d like it (though, I’m sure it was just fine) and I had to basically hug the tree to get the cord around it. Egads. Then I had to tie it off above my head which, unfortunately, requires two hands.

Well, it’s up. And thank goodness - it works!

I talked to a guy (ever so briefly) on 80 meters tonight in Paris, TN. It was an odd-ball mode that I had never used called Hellschreiber (or Feld-Hell for short). It’s an old teletype mode the German’s invented back during WWI. People decided to try it with modern day computers and have breathed new life into the mode. My understanding is that it was the first mechanized form of radio communication.

Well, hope everyone has a happy new year - and I’ll try to stay off the ladders for a while.

I think I speak for all consumers when I say… we hate your menus.

You know what? When I plop down $10, $15, even $20 for a movie… you know what I’m interested in?

THE MOVIE!

Not the 15 minutes of menu introduction with swooshes and bangs and clips from the movies and pretty music. Nor the lousy video game graphics. If I wanted a video game, I would not have bought…

A MOVIE!

Now, it’s forgivable if I can hit the skip-forward button and get to the guts of the menu. To Disney… kudos to you for making sure we can skip previews and the lengthy menus. To the rest… shame on you!

My kids just acquired an old movie about a certain rangifer with a nasal disorder. Just like many of their other movies… there were several previews that could not be skipped, and a lengthy (though not the longest I’ve seen) menu which could not be skipped either!

I dare say if we could find the people who produce these things, put them in a room with a whiny child eager to watch a movie, and give them their own DVD to start - things would change.

Please, please! If you produce DVD’s and are responsible for these menus, read the DVD spec. Become familiar with the skip feature. Use it. Disney figured it out. You can, too!

The consumers of America would appreciate it.

When we bought this house, I found it astonishing that it was recommended we get a smoke detector not just on every floor… but in every sleeping space. I really felt the pinch when I started remodeling and found out that, per the build code, all my smoke detectors had to be wired into the house’s wiring and interconnected. Well, I finally got them all wired up and I truly feel that it was worth the effort. We feel much more secure now that we have a smoke detector in almost every room.

But I always felt that installing carbon monoxide detectors were overkill. I mean - how many people have really died from CO poising?

Well, yesterday, it was almost my family.

Tonya called me at work and towards the end of our conversation, she mentioned she had a headache. She thought it was the front moving through ahead of the rain. I didn’t give it much thought. But then she said that Eli woke up and was acting like he had a headache. She thought it was the weather for him, too. But for some reason a vision of my hot water heater popped in my head. Then she said Clayton woke up nauseous and pale. That’s when I started to panic.

See, when the previous owner of our house had the hot water heater put in, whoever did it cut a corner and left the old vent hood in place. Newer water heaters already have a hood in place and don’t need an extra one. They just left it because it meant one less pipe to cut. I recall a contractor mentioning to me that I should ditch the extra hood to prevent exhaust from escaping into the basement. I put it on my “to do - sometime” list and forgot it.

Well, that hood would not leave my mind and I had Tonya dig up the carbon monoxide detector. Yep, we had one. It was one that plugged into the wall and kids never left it alone. So we put it on the shelf. She plugged it in and a few minutes later - it went off.

So they went shopping for a bit in the clean fresh air while I came home to figure out what was going on. I cranked up the hot water heater to get it going and held a mirror up to the exhaust hood. Sure enough - it got foggy immediately. My “to do” list got a quick shift.

My father-in-law, Jim, came over and helped me pull and replace the extra hood with a piece of pipe. It was a quick job and we saw an immediate result. The mirror didn’t fog up and we got good suction up the hood.

And we now have four carbon monoxide detectors throughout the house.

The moral of this story…

If you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector - get one! If you have one carbon monoxide detector - get another one! Don’t mess around with this. When I think about what I could have lost, it scares me to death.

Well, I just took the plunge on IE7.  I just wanted to get rid of the yellow shield on my system tray, really.  Well, it’s all slick looking I guess and I’m sure those tabs a gas for people who like tabs (not I).  But the address bar really bugged me.

Why, oh why?

Every application with a menu bar since the cave man first clicked “start” has been at the top of the window.  EVERY ONE!  Why, all of the sudden, is the address bar at the top?  What sort of innovation is that??  Well, poop on it.  I want my menu on top.

Well, I did a bit of Googling  (as I’m sure you did if you’re reading this) and I found how to move the menu up.  Well, actually, move the address bar down.  6 of one…

If you’ve never used “regedit” or you don’t know anything about your registry, get used the menu bar where its.  Don’t do this.  Please.  And don’t blame me if you screw it up…

First - close all your IE sessions.

Then go into your registry editor (”Start->Run” and type “regedit” and hit enter - but I’m sure you know that).  Dive down into the HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ InternetExplorer \ Toolbar \ WebBrowser key.  Right click on the right hand side (where the keys are) and add a new “DWORD” key.  Call it “ITBar7Position” and give it a value of “1″.

That’s it!  Now, this isn’t perfect.  I also had the Google toolbar for IE and the address bar wound up ABOVE it (rather than below it).  Sheesh.  Why they couldn’t just make the address bar a toolbar like it was in IE6, I’ll never know.