Bill Blevins
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Homepage: http://www.billblevins.com
Jabber/GTalk: sailorbill@gmail.com
AIM: billblevinsjr
Posts by Bill Blevins
TV Transplant Surgery Successful
Feb 20th
I fixed the blue line problem on my LG Plasma HGTV today after replacing a circuit board, but now Dale Earnhardt Jr’s car is orange!
After removing all of the screws holding on the back cover of the set, It took a while to figure out the easiest way to get the to board I needed to replace and remove the fewest wires and other components as possible. I ended up removing all of the wires on the rear-most panel except for the power connector lines that were located on the bottom right.
The board swung freely so that I could get my tools and hands behind the left side.
Replacing the board wasn’t a big deal except for the little swing connectors on the two wire harnesses at the bottom. After I figured out how they worked, it was easy, but I did break both of the ones on the old board trying to figure out how to get the wires out. Basically, it the locks are on a hinge and swing up and down. When down, they pinch the wires in the correct place.
I put the whole thing together and the sound was great, but no picture. After sitting there a while thinking about all of the wires I unhooked, I remembered one that I forgot to put back in place. After removing the back of the TV again and connecting the wire, everything worked great.
NOTE: Dale Earnhardt Jr. is driving an orange car this weekend.
Beginner Fly Tying Class
Jan 20th
Four of us started an eight-week beginner fly tying class at the local parks and recreation center here in Fairport, NY last night. We were told that we’d be learning the basics by tying “classic” patterns that “work in Western New York”.
I need patterns that work in Western New York!
Although I’ve tied flies for a while, I’ve never taken a formal class. I’ve read a lot of books, bought a lot of fur and feathers, watched a few instructional DVD’s, but mostly gained my knowledge to date watching videos on YouTube!
The class was educational, interesting, occasionally entertaining and most importantly fun to hang out with my fishing buddies.
I’ve already picked up a few tips (ie: hold on to your scissors while you are tying) and we completed two patterns – both steelhead jigs – tied on large hooks with molded heads.
Stay tuned for the whole series!
Chartreuse Marabou Steelhead Jig
Brown Bleeding Bucktail Steelhead Jig
Fly fishing at Oak Orchard in Western, NY
Dec 2nd
I’m changing shirts! I always seem to have on this orange Filson moleskin!! I’m sure next time I’ll catch more fish with a black shirt.
This is Oak Orchard Creek in Western, NY, right below the point where the fish can’t go upstream any further – about 2.5 miles from Lake Ontario. (I don’t think they can scale this falls).
I didn’t catch anything but I hooked one and bent the #8 hook pretty good and I did cast at a nice brown and a 4-year-old rainbow (they call them steelheads here) but neither were hungry or I scared them off with the big 8 wt. and #2 hook on a 1x leader!!
Next time… smaller gear!!
I did see 3 steelhead caught on spin gear. They looked like 13-inchers and didn’t put up much of a fight for the guys reeling them in.
Beautiful day here with 53 degrees in December! Nice! Next trip will require steel studs on the boots I’m sure!
My Radio Flyer Wagon
Nov 30th
I’ve begun a project to rebuild my early 1970’s era Radio Flyer Wagon. Thus far, it has been photographed and disassembled. I haven’t been able to find an image of a Radio Flyer Wagon like this one online yet. I did find a similar wagon but the wheels were different. I was, and still am searching for a source to buy an original style stencil to repaint the logo. I may have to have a Radio Flyer stencil made here locally with someone cutting a pattern based on my photos. Stay tuned for followups as the project progresses.
Weather in Fairport, NY
Oct 2nd
This morning, I finished the installation of a wireless personal weather station at my house.
I ordered the Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 Plus Wireless station from Ambient Weather.
The package that I chose included a WIFI router from Hautespot Networks and it connects wirelessly to my home network and sends data from the weather console in the house to the Web without the need to connect to a computer. Since I use Apple MacBooks (ie: laptops), I didn’t want to run a PC to constantly act as a server and send data to the Internet.
In order to separate the wind unit and the main weather station, I added an extra wireless transmitter to the package so that I could separate the two and locate both of them in different places. I also added a heater unit so that the rain collection unit won’t freeze in the winter time.
The anemometer is on a mouting pole on the apex of the roof and captures wind speed and direction. The wind data is send via a solar powered unit that sends a 2.4GHz wireless signal to a console in the house every second.
The main collection unit, the main part of the weather station, is mounted on a fence post in my back yard . It collects information on humidity, temperature, rainfall, rainfall rate, UV, Solar radiation and barometric pressure. These data points are sent from another solar powered 2.4GHz transmitter every second to the house where it then meets up with the anemometer data in the display console for display in the den.
The display console hooks to the wireless router and that sends information through my broadband connection to the Web.
The sites receiving and displaying the data are WeatherUnderground, WeatherBug, HamWeather and the CWOP network.
CWOP stands for Citizen Weather Observer Program and certain weather stations can feed that network data to be used to help with weather research by private, public and government institutions. I was assigned a station ID of DW3513.
Data sent to the CWOP program is analyzed and compared with nearby stations and the expected predictions for the area where a PWS is stores. Here is the page that shows the results of station DW3515.
Finally, there is a cool map called the WunderMap and also a full-screen real-time page from WeatherUnderground that is pretty cool too.
Flickr photos of the mounting locations and devices are posted as well.