Sephy’s Platzish

This is the start of my project to get the photos from my trip to the zoo posted to here, so that everyone can see them, and not just myself and/or a few select others.

I’ve already shown y’all a picture of a peacock which are allowed to roam the zoo at their leisure. However, I did take other pictures, and the first non-peacock photo I took was of the Pepsi machine. The zoo has a marketing deal with Pepsi, so they have specialized machines.

They also sell the sodas for $2.00 each for a 20oz bottle. I had my own water, so I didn’t buy any.

Actually, I didn’t buy anything other than admission into the zoo - I had my own munchies with me, so I didn’t have to worry too much.

You might not know it if you’ve been only reading the blog, but I am still alive and kicking around the Internets.

Last time I posted, I was still talking about combovers and still on one side of the fence when it came to the election - however, I have now moved over to the other side and I’ve realized that I’m actually more liberal than I thought I was.

Also, in that time, I have gotten involved in a project - at first it was reluctant involvement, but since launching it and thinking more about my political feelings, I’ve gotten involved more - and more willingly. That project is The Mudflats Forum - which was started out of a blog - Mudflats - which gained a lot of traction when Sarah Palin was named as John McCain’s running mate.

It is an amazingly craizy busy forum, with 1200-plus members and nearly 700 posts a day. The best part is that the moderation team on the forum is a group of awesome people, without whom Snos & I wouldn’t be able to run the forum as well as it does run.

Now, in other news

I’m still working at my job, and still looking at other opportunities to get more work on the side; I’ve been to the zoo, pictures of which you’ll be seeing over the next few weeks when I have a moment to actually sit down and edit them! I’ve also been to the race track - free - thanks to a gas station.

However, just so you know, here is a sample image from the zoo - nothing terribly exciting, just a peacock which are all about the place

Pretty much anyone who has a pet knows the significance of the Rainbow Bridge. I first heard about it around ten years ago when we received a piece of paper from our vet on the passing of the first dog I remember - a black lab, who was found at home by my brother having passed away after being to the vet the previous day.

Back in January, I asked about some strange behaviours that my dog was having involving licking her legs. The advice was to take her to the vet, but unfortunately we couldn’t afford to do it at that time, however, we did take her to our vet when, on the second day that I was working, she started limping heavily and favoring her right rear leg. It turned out that it was just a pulled muscle, but the doctor also took a look at the bump on her face. He made the independent determination that it was a cancerous - a melanoma.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure that this could be right because of the fact that he didn’t do any kind of analysis other than looking at it. However, he did give us some meds for her, and said that time was running out for her - nothing specific or anything, but sooner rather than later.

Now that we’re 4 months after the diagnosis, the growth on her face, which started out as a slight bump, has grown to something that has almost doubled the width of her face. On Friday, I noticed that there was some skin showing, but nothing major. However, Saturday comes around, and I notice that the skin has been broken. At that point, I think we had come to the determination that it was time to make a move.

The vet’s office is closed on weekends, so we have waited until today to make the call to the vet. At first we were going to have my brother come out to take her over to the vet, but in thinking about it, it is only fitting that since she is "my" dog (I even had my Senior pictures taken with her), I should be the one who does this, and to be the last one to take off her leash, and to take some last photos of her.

That’s something I’ve done a lot of these last couple of days - take photos of her. She’s been laying quietly on the floor, or on the couch, and mostly sleeping. If she’s up, she’ll be licking herself because (and this is my thought as to why) she’s trying to take away some of the excess saliva that she has in her mouth. However, it’s just been a lot of sleeping on her side the last day or so.

All that is left for us to do is make a call to the vet (which I know will be hard to do), and to have her set up with an appointment tomorrow for us to take her in for one last examination and probably then to be taken away and being given a proper and humane farewell, along with her crossing the Rainbow Bridge.

Lastly, here’s a photo of her from better times - the beginning of last year -

I haven’t mentioned it too often on here, but I am an owner of some interesting electronic equipment. No, not stuff like a 1950s-era Bakelite radio (though I know of one right around here!), or some kind of funky Japanese robot dog purchased from the Internets. The equipment I’m talking about is a police scanner.

Actually, this is something that I’ve been interested for a long time - even way back when we had a ten-channel scanner that had the channels for my county (though only two of them would work now I believe), along with the weather channel. If you wanted to program it, you would have had to purchase a crystal to receive a specific frequency. Wanted to listen to something else? Sorry, out of luck.

Normally, we’d only drag it out when we heard sirens or when there were storms in the area - one infamous tale that I’ve been told is from a snowstorm in the ’70s when one of the cops was driving around and had gotten off of the road, and then wound up at a church, and stopped to pray for a bit.

After a while though, the scanner has gone missing and I don’t know where it is, other than to say it’s probably somewhere in the house somewhere. To be honest, I didn’t bother with wanting to listen to the police or anything exciting until one day the railroad put up a box near the house and, if I was listening to the three-channel weather radio we had at the time, it would interfere with it whenever a train went through.

To make a long story short, I go off to college, come back home, the weather radio’s broken, and I have nothing better to do with my time (since I wasn’t working) than watch the trains. That leads me to Radio Shack and buying my first programmable scanner - the first night, I listened to ham radio, got some frequencies on the web, and then put them into the radio. I also listened to some interesting stuff like goings on at a local Burger King (not the window cos those are pretty weak signals) and the city buses.

I didn’t know it then, but I needed to have a different type of scanner to be able to track these conversations about unruly passengers, or to listen to other Sheriffs’ departments. So, after I started working, I invested some cash into getting a scanner capable of receiving these other areas. And that changed my ways of listening to the radio - now I was listening to the freeway patrols, getting to know a lot more than I needed and even being able to hear lane closures for motorcades when they happen.

It was also around this time that I was given an antenna - which I didn’t know anything about mounting, placement, or anything. For quite a while it sat, quite literally, in my bedroom with a cable extending from it to my scanner. I also had a couple of other antennas which allowed me to hear signals from a wide swath of the area, and even from the east coast. However, due to the confusion of what exactly I was listening to (I couldn’t get the tone information to figure out exactly what it was), I started to get interested in buying a new scanner.

So, I did - I purchased what has to be one of the best scanners out there - the Uniden BC780XLT - the only thing that it doesn’t do is digital, which isn’t that big of a concern yet here anyway. I also purchased a basic scanner that is useful to find new frequencies when it was on sale for $70 or so after Thanksgiving one year. This trifecta of scanners has been the set I’ve used most often, and here they are as a happy family on the day I bought the third one.

By that time, I had figured some things out about the antenna I received, the sordid details I’ll go into in another post, but I was picking up signals reliably from most of the southern third of the state, and even in to Illinois and Michigan. However, after that winter, I started to get involved in other things and the scanners took a back seat.

Sure, I’d bring one along if I was going on a long trip, but I had lost interest in doing the long listening sessions I’d have with it, just listening to hear what I could get in over the airwaves. The best one to me is still when I picked up Environment Canada’s weather radio from the area near Lake Erie or so. I even used a spreadsheet to log the frequencies and tones I’d get. The scanner got put away, and I kept myself busy in other ways.

However the storms over the last week, and the general start of the summer storm season has rekindled my interest in scanning. I think part of it is that when I had my little scanner at work the other week, people were very interested in it - more for the fact that it got the weather than anything else, but it set off a spark in me.

It’s done so much to rekindle that I’ve invested another $33 in a new antenna (and adapter) to replace the old one and now have it mounted outside on the same setup I’d used for the other one. Now, I can hear the trains well before they get here, thanks to similar boxes some 10+ rail miles away, hear almost all of the same agencies that I’d heard in the past, and in general, keep abreast of what is going on with the local radio scene once more.

As one fella I know on an Illinois scanning list says, Happy Scanning!

One of the things I’ve been grumpy about a lot is the way that severe weather warnings are presented on local TV. Do they need to be presented? Yes, because it is a public service to inform the viewing audience of where storms are and if you need to take cover from said storms. That’s something we all can agree on. However, there are good ways and there are bad ways to handle informing the public of severe weather.

Let’s look at a bad way first, shall we?

This picture comes from just a couple of weeks ago, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, when we had some (as you can see on the radar picture) storms in the area. They weren’t severe (at the time), and there was just a watch issued for the area.

However, the fine folks at channel 12 decided to do what they do every time there’s a watch issued for the area - squeeze the picture so that it’s completely unwatchable and essentially waste about 1/8th of the screen with their graphic telling you that you’re watching channel 12’s weather bar. Of course, not to be outdone by the weather department, you also have the convenient reminder that you’re WATCHING CHANNEL 12 in the lower right hand corner. By the way, the reason for the black bars is that this was taken from their digital feed, and if it were not for the watch bar, the show would have been in HD, and the 12 logo would have been about 1/4 the size.

By the way if you think that channel 12 are the only ones who do this kind of thing, here’s what channel 58’s bar looks like (note that this is from September 2006, during which time they were running a promotion and squeezing the picture even further than they had already with their weather bar!)

Channels 4 and 6 at least use a bit of sense (though how much sense is questionable because it just happens that they wind up wasting more space by doing this) and just shrink the picture so that the aspect ratio isn’t messed up; only the picture is smaller.

Now, let’s take a look at how this kind of thing should be pursued (or, at least how it was pursued by the local stations in the past). First off, I should commend channel 12 on their old way of doing this - they would just put up text at the bottom of the screen that read, for example, "T-STORM WARNING ___ COUNTY". It was simple, didn’t interfere too much with the picture, and was a perfect solution to a complex problem.

However, what really got me going on this was the fact that I was able to pick up stations from out of the area yesterday (ahh, the old days of TVDX, you might say, and that’s true, and this was my first time doing some digital DXing, which made it that much cooler ). Thanks to the weather, a lot of the stations had their warnings up and showing for you to see.

On every single occasion, no station had squeezed, squished, crunched, or even re-sized a picture to accommodate the warning information. All they did was put a simple overlay of the affected counties, and text telling you what warnings were out (along with the counties affected). In another instance, an ABC affiliate broke into their programming (game 2 of the NBA finals), but did something that I think would give Milwaukee TV bosses heart attacks (well, except for channel 6 back in 2007) - they kept the game on in the bottom left and had the meteorologist in the upper right!

So, you may ask, what did warnings look like in the "olden days" of TV (i.e. anywhere but Milwaukee yesterday). Well, I could show you a picture I took of one station that is literally stuck in the early 90s with just showing a storm cloud in the lower left — which is what they used to do on local TV; sometimes with an S or a T to tell you what kind of warning it was. However, as it so happens, I have an old picture from channel 4, from a taped airing of "Days of Our Lives" circa I have no idea - maybe late 90s or early 2000s.

Look! A full-screen picture (though it wouldn’t be in HD because none of the major stations have the technology yet, but you’ve got the feeling it’s coming) with a simple overlay. Can anyone tell me why the TV stations can’t make such a simple step backward that would, in the end, be a huge step forward?

Oh, and by the way, I must also give kudos to the PBS broadcaster in the area - channels 10 & 36 - because they can do an HD overlay, and the size of it is very comfortable - it looks like a postage stamp on an envelope. When viewed on a 42-inch screen, I bet it’s the perfect size.

What I’m curious about is if Milwaukee is the only TV market that does this stupidity. I have this inkling that we are. That should be a lesson to them, but I don’t think they care to listen…