I have been chasing down the RFI coming from my house. A touch lamp, a television, and a cable box have all been identified as sources of RFI in the house. The lamp has been replaced, and the television is going to be my next project, but for now I can turn it off when I am on the radio.
Yesterday, the cable company came out and replaced the cable box. The RFI in the house is now showing at S0-S1. Now I can finally enjoy some productive radio time.
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Duty
There is an interesting case in New York involving an EMT and a pregnant woman with asthma. The asthma patient had been seen earlier in the day by paramedics for her condition and had refused to be transported for evaluation. The EMT, who was working in dispatch for FDNY, was on a coffee break when the woman nearby began having an asthma attack. Bystanders, frantically looking for help, saw the dispatcher in uniform and asked her for help. The dispatcher called 911, but refused to get up and evaluate the patient. The women died.
FDNY Was sued by the dead woman’s family, and the EMT was charged with the crime of negligence. To protect itself from the lawsuit, the FDNY claimed that dispatchers on break do not have a duty to act, and asked that criminal charges against the EMT be dropped.
My personal feeling is that when you are on the clock and in uniform, you do your job, even if you are on a coffee break. This EMT should have tried to do something. Even without equipment, she could have performed CPR.
Off the clock, I agree that you don’t have a duty to act. Heck, I quit stopping at car accidents about ten years ago when a paramedic in Central Florida who stopped at a car accident was struck and killed by oncoming traffic, and the State of Florida refused to pay the widow his death benefits
because he was not on duty.
In this case, this EMT got lucky that her employer needed to avoid legal liability more than they wanted to prosecute her.
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Dumbass firearm instructor
This video astounds me.
What this guy is saying could easily be construed as murder. He wants you to make sure that anyone who enters your home is dead. He says to either shoot them in the head, or after shooting them, go back to bed for an hour or so before calling 911, so that you can let them “bleed out.” Here are some of his statements in comments:
When someone breaks into your home in a home invasion at 3:00 a.m. they
are not another individual, they are a predatory puke who is there to
kill you and your family. Don’t you pay any attention to the news? Don’t
you know what happens to homeowners and their families in home
invasions?What I in fact said was if you can put two to center mass and one in the
head before they hit the ground that can be made to look like a
legitimate shoot. If they hit the ground before you can put one in the
head that’s going to be a problem. Then you’re going to have to let them
bleed out.
When a person enters your home in a castle doctrine state, the law presumes that the homeowner is facing a deadly threat, and allows the homeowner to use deadly force. That presumption disappears if the state can prove that you deliberately allowed a person to die after they were no longer a threat. An attorney in the comments says effectively the same thing, and this is his response:
What will your hourly charge be to defend a so called CLEAN SHOOT? I
betcha if you are an attorney your charges will be a lot. If I dispose
of the body I don’t have to pay them.
This video will be used against the maker to show premeditated murder, even if the shoot is a proper one. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Look at another video he produces:
At 1: 34, he says that he keeps his Sig 220 in a “combat ready condition” where it is loaded and the hammer is back. This guy is a total dumbass. This is a double action pistol with no manual safety, no grip safety, and no safety built into the trigger. He fingers the trigger and sweeps the camera multiple times before clearing the pistol. This is a negligent discharge waiting to happen. He goes on to say:
I haven’t taken this thing apart yet, and have no desire to. My guess is that this lever (indicates takedown lever) releases it, and it comes apart like a Glock.
This guy supposedly runs a training academy. I seriously hope that no one takes his advice, because they will likely wind up in jail. Anyone who has attended this school that is involved in a shooting better hope that the prosecutor doesn’t find out about it, because they will be in a world of trouble.
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Tsunami
The east coast of the US, specifically New Jersey, was struck by a tsunami on June 13. I had no idea.
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Physics humor
I bought a Quantum car. Now every time I look at the speedometer, I get lost.
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More on HAM noise and MoCA
I think that I have located all of the sources of RFI in my house. Some are easy to solve, others are not. Here they are:
1 There is a touch lamp in one of the bedrooms that is generating broadband noise. It is easily solved by getting rid of the lamp.
2 There is a television in the living room that is causing noise that extends from 3.4 mHz all the way up to 9.8 mHz.
3 The most vexing is the fact that I have a service called “whole house DVR” that allows us to watch recorded shows in any room of the house. It does this by using a system called “multimedia over coax,” abbreviated as MoCA. Since there are three of these cable boxes in the house, any time two of the three boxes are powered up, they begin to communicate over the house’s cable lines. This is why it was so hard to track down. I am going to have to call the tech support for the cable company and see if they can help me out with calming down this noise.
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Stranger danger fail
So a man meets a woman and her three kids as they are shopping at Wal Mart at 11 pm on Friday night. After befriending them, he offers to take one of the children (an 8 year old girl) for a snack and leaves the store with her. The police issue an Amber alert. The man is found and arrested on Saturday morning at 9 am. The girl is not with him. Just over an hour later, the girl’s body is discovered.
The man has an extensive criminal record:
1992 Convicted of attempted kidnapping and selling obscene materials. This placed him in the sexual offender database.
2003 arrested for burglary and dealing in stolen property
2006 Parole violation
2009 Child abuse, making obscene phone calls to a 10 year old girl, and making verbal threats. According to the arrest report he claimed he was a social worker with
the Florida Department of Children and Families and told the family they
were under investigation by the state. He plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of attempted child abuse and
attempted impersonation of a public employee.
He was just released
May 31, and 21 days later, he murdered a little girl. There is plenty of blame to go around.
The douchebag:
Evil exists in the world. There are evil people in the world, and we need to constantly be aware of them. it doesn’t matter if they are armed with a gun, a knife, or with nothing but charm and guile, they are still deadly. Never forget that humans are the most dangerous animal on the planet.
The mother:
We teach our children that they should avoid strangers. The problem is that the majority of abductions in the US are committed by people that are known to the child. As parents, each of us have a responsibility to know and vet the people who have access to our children. This woman let a man that she had only known for a few minutes walk away with her child. She will relive that moment for the rest of her life. If she is married, the odds say that this marriage is over. The feelings of resentment from the husband will likely destroy that relationship. A momentary bad decision has ended a child’s life and destroyed a family.
All of us:
By continuing to push for the war on drugs, we have thrown more of our population in jail than any other civilization in history. We keep having to let the dangerous people like this guy out of prison to make room for drug convictions, only to see them hurt people. This guy was released at least twice, and broke the law almost immediately upon release.
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HAM issues
I am having a problem with my HAM bands. There is quite a bit of RFI coming from my house. To begin with, there is a lot of noise on all bands below 30 meters. I managed to isolate that, it is coming from the LCD television in the living room. When the TV is turned off, the noise is gone. This means that I can only work the 40 and 80 meter bands when no one in the house is watching TV in the living room. I can live with that.
In the 20m band, it is showing up as an S8 on the signal meter most of the time, and this hash covers up all but the strongest stations. Here is the pattern:
– turning off the circuit breakers to everything but the shack, it disappears and I get an S0-1.
– turning off one breaker at a time doesn’t get rid of it.
– Turning on all of the breakers doesn’t always make it return.
– When it DOES return, it starts at S3, and builds to an S8 over about a 30 second period
– The limits of the hash are from 10.6 MHz through 15.4 MHz.
This is driving me crazy. I think it is more than one piece of equipment.
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I blame the lawyers
I ignore signs like the one below, found at the Florida Mall in Orlando:
Or this one, found at Florida Hospital Celebration:
Or this one, found at Heart of Florida hospital:
Even though these signs do not carry the force of law, and I can legally ignore them, many people tell me that I should not, because I should honor the wishes of the property owner. I wonder if these signs really DO reflect the wishes of the owner, or if they reflect a legal climate that has been forced upon the owner.
This article explains that at least one insurer thinks that insuring a property owner who allows legal concealed carry is too great of a risk. I don’t blame the insurance company. I blame our legal system. Here is why:
If a murderer kills people on a property, the owner of that property is not liable for damages.
If a person carrying a concealed weapon shoots a person on that property, the property owner is liable, unless they prohibit concealed weapons on their property.
This means that a property owner that prohibits concealed weapons is in a win0win scenario: If anyone shoots anyone on their property, they have no liability. A property owner that allows concealed weapons is likewise liable for any shooting that occurs on their property.
This means that the property owner is not freely choosing to prohibit weapons, they are instead choosing to limit liability. Remove that liability, and you remove the incentive for businesses to ban weapons.
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Like a bad novel
The government has a record of all communications. They know who leaks information. The government has stated that they can kill anyone that they deem to be a threat to national security, and have already done so. This has slowed leaks to reporters down to nearly zero. Informants and reporters are disappearing or dying under accidental circumstances.
The man who saw Breitbart collapse is missing. A technician in the Los Angeles County coroners office, where Breitbart’s body was taken, died of arsenic poisoning.
The list of people damaging to the government that are waking up dead is getting longer.
Andrew Breitbart dies March 2012. A technician in the coroner’s office that handled the body dies of arsenic poisoning on the day the autopsy results are released.
December 2012:
Job Price, the Navy SEAL that killed Osama Bin Laden dies of apparent suicide.
January 2013:
John Noveske of Noveske Rifle Works died in a car crash.
Aaron Swartz, a computer activist that was known for placing government documents in the public domain, was found hanging in his apartment.
Keith Ratliff committing suicide by duct taping himself to a chair and shooting himself in the back of the head.
February 2013:
Chris Kyle murdered at a gun range in Texas.
May 2013
Andy P. Hart, a public defender for Guantanamo detainees, committed suicide May 2, 2013.
Two members of the FBI’s HRT, involved in the capture of the arrest of the Boston bomber, die in a training accident.
The FBI shoots and kills a person of interest in the Boston bombing in Orlando. (This happened less than a mile from the apartment where I was living at the time.)
June 2013
Michael Hastings dies in a car accident.
There is also Tracy Lawrence, the woman who exposed the foreclosure fraud mess, found dead in 2011.
There were times when I would have passed this off as coincidence and waved the speculation off as a conspiracy theory, but after the Fast and Furious scandal, the NSA scandal, and the announcement that the US can and does execute American citizens without trial is making me wonder. These deaths may all be coincidence. Who can tell? All I know is that if a person were writing a novel, and this were the plot, the editors wold tell them that it was too unrealistic.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Enemy Action.”
— Auric Goldfinger