This weekend was the Plano Balloon Fest and it was a great success! I worked communications on Friday night and Sunday night assisting and coordinating the balloons. There were large crowds every night, but by far Saturday was the largest!

This event was a ton of fun, as I have not done any Public Service stuff in quite awhile. I got a chance to meet a bunch of the Plano Amateur Radio Club members. I forgot how much fun ham radio is and I really want to get going with it again. I even met another ham that is interested in shooting and actually competes in IDPA (Something else I am looking into doing). We got a chance to talk a bit and I will probably be going to a few matches in the next little bit.

This was a busy weekend, a lot was going on... Friday Ash and I went to see 'Once upon a time in Mexico' which was very good! Then on Saturday, I had a meeting with my school group for a few hours, followed by a meeting for the Plano Balloon Festival. That night we went over to our friend house and had a great dinner. Thanks again to Shannon and Larry... Last but not least, I spend almost all day on Sunday finishing up my CSI presentation.

So at any rate, this weekend is the Plano Balloon Festival and I will be helping out on the field this year. In years past, I have worked balloon recovery (Driving around town trying to determine where all of the balloons are landing) and this year wanted to stay on the field to help out. So far, there are 98 balloons registered to participate in the event. I will try to grab as many pictures as I can and post them to the usual place. Speaking of that, I never posted the pictures from Defcon 11 (sorry about that).

Well back to work...

This weekend was great! The weather was awesome and we actually had some time to enjoy it. A few of our friends came up to the house on Saturday for a BBQ and it was so nice we got to sit outside and enjoy the nice evening. On Sunday Ash and I worked around the house a bit and then went out to pick up a prescription for Ashley. You know its pretty bad when you pull up to the drive up at the pharmacy and the people look out at you and say "Ashley Neilson, right?" Oh man...

For those of you that were receiving notification of new postings, please re-signup. When my server died the other day I lost the subscription list. I need to adjust a few things to be able to send the alerts but if you can re-enter your email address on my main page that would be great...

Oh and the Wasatch100 was a great success. Looking at the numbers there were 112,738 searches made on the on-line database over the two days of the run. Thanks to Perry's help we were able to recode the site this year and make it a ton more stable. We only ran into one problem and that was related to the database being uploaded, but it was corrected within a few minutes. Much better than last years, rebooting of the server every hour solution! Looking forward to next years run, and who knows maybe I will be able to make it back to Utah to participate...

This weekend is the Wasatch100! For those of you that don't know, the Wasatch100 is a 100 mile endurance run held in the Wasatch Mountains. There is a cumulative elevation gain of approximately 26,882 feet, as well as a cumulative loss of approximately 26,131 feet throughout the course, and no, I don't run in it...

Back when I lived in Utah, I helped provide the radio communication and rest stop support for the runners. No that I live in Texas, I provide the interface for runner inquiries (CLICK HERE). This interface is used by people all over the world to inquire about their friends and families status in the run. The information is usually current to about 5 minutes thanks to all of the Ham radio operators in Utah that are constantly calling in times to a central net control station.

At any rate, it has been a busy week and I am glad it is Friday...

As many of you know by know, my beloved server suffered a major failure over the holiday weekend and is still recovering...

One by one service is getting back on-line but it is very slow and extremely time consuming (something I don't have a lot of these days). At any rate, if something isn't working or seems weird, please check back as I am working to resolve all of the issues one by one.

If I host services like email or websites for you, please let me know what problems you are experiencing and I will get them resolved. We just signed a new account: Deal Heaven (http://www.dealheaven.com) so go check them out and see if you can get a heavenly deal :)

Back to work on the server...