2017 News and Information
Note: All information on
these pages and others on this web site are for
entertainment purposes only and do not reflect reality.
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12/31/17: The end of another year. Lost a family member, hit by a hurricane, trashed our main station computer and dealing with the metal building company from hell! What a year! |
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12/27/17: We received a very generous donation from a family all the way on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean, longtime listeners Simon, Kelly, Kate and Oli. Thank you so very much!
Tune in for the new year. We start playing Auld Lang Syne at the top of every hour starting at 10pm Eastern Standard Time. (GMT-5)
Total donations to date, $100 |
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12/25/17: Christmas music all day today! |
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12/10/17: Not much to report. Still trying to get back to normal. Still on the backup computer system and still working on recovering data and repairing the main system. Just not a lot of time to commit to it. |
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11/30/17: Got most of the wood fence propped up with braces just to make things look more normal around here. |
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11/20/17: finally got the pool clear and bright, nice to cool off after a long day trimming and repairing stuff around here. |
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11/05/17: Been dealing with a nagging nerve issue since 1998 that there is no cure for and it has been slowly getting worse, doesn’t react well to all this heavy work and long days. But enough of that. Ask me about the shop I been saving up for years for in order to be able to tinker away my retirement years and I will really get passionately loud as my face gets red. To put it mildly it is not going well! |
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10/30/17: Got the antenna and tower top all straightened out and put a new power supply in the transmitter. |
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10/07/17: Lots of time on the chainsaw and making big piles on the swale. Dealing with insurance adjusters, what a pain! |
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09/30/17: Still Cleaning up from the storm, probably will be for some time to come. Transmitter power supply fried so we’re running FM off of a 1 watt portable for now. |
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09/19/17: Power came back on last night about 8pm. Secondary WAN came back up 10am this morning. The station was off line for 210 hours, the longest in its history. Some of the holes in the fence are patched with temporary welded wire so at least we can let the puppies outside without fear of them wondering off. The pool is a little less green. The yard is only about 40% cleared and there is no more room on the swale for the rest of it. Still no TV. I was here for Andrew and while Irma was no Andrew It was a close second. Can you say Climate Change? |
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09/17/17: Got the trees off of and fished all the gunk out of the now green pool. Luckily no plumbing broken so added the pool pump to the generator load, maybe I can bring it back to clear without having to drain it. Cell service close to pre storm levels. Still no power, internet, or TV |
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09/15/17: Called in a favor from an old colleague of mine, that isn’t retired, and he got permission to bring the department fuel tanker over and fill me all back up to tied us over till gas stations come back on line. Limited cell service, 2 to 3 bars sometimes. |
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09/14/17: Still no change in situation and running low on Diesel. Good thing we are on well water and have lots of powdered Gatorade on hand because it is hotter than hell out there. |
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09/13/17: Two days just to clear the driveway. No power, internet, TV, or cell service. FM side running on a small two watt portable transmitter and whip antenna. The hunt for Diesel is on to keep our generator going. Meanwhile we stick to the plan and siphon from the truck, tractor, and chipper till we can find an operational gas station. Got the tractor cut out of the fallen trees so now we can use it to move debris. |
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09/11/17: It’s my birthday, what a shitty Bday present. This place is trashed! No breaches to the structure so my boarding worked but water leaks did a lot of damage to interior finishes and electrical. We went through every towel in the house sopping up water for 30 hours. The tower is down and trashed along with the antenna and cabling and the transmitter gave up sometime before I unplugged it. This once beautiful place, lush with foliage and fruiting trees, is a horrible sickening mess. Every tree is either stripped bare, broken in half or torn from the ground. Fallen trees cover the driveway, pool, sheds. 100’s of feet of fence gone. Power poles and lines everywhere. Now the cleanup begins. |
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09/10/17: Irma is here. The sound of the wind is eerie and a bit freighting. I can feel the building shuddering and swaying in the wind. Our primary WAN went down as soon as we lost power Saturday morning and our secondary WAN died 30 hours later. Unfortunately that was before I got this uploaded to the web server. I can hear trees snapping and things being tossed around outside. I believe wind gusts are well above 150. I shut the FM side down when I realized one of the noises I was hearing was our antenna banging against the roof. |
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09/09/17: Well I did the best I could. Was still putting up boards at 1pm but the wind got to be too much to continue. Wish us luck. We lost power and are on backup generator since about 10am |
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09/04/17: I have a very bad feeling about Irma. Heading to the Depot to get a bunch of plywood and attempt to board this place up. No easy task for this 3 story, 5 level double octagon shaped structure. One stream, 32Bit AAC+, has been converted to V2. |
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08/24/17: Well more problems. We have been on V1 version of Shoutcast Server for a long time, no problems till now. Seems as Shoutcast has decided to drop support for V1 so we are no longer listed in the Shoutcast directory. Oh you can still listen to us if you go to our website or have our URL saved but a search for Jack And Jill Radio on the Shoutcase page results in nothing being found. So we are trying to get on V2. Will keep you posted. |
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07/04/17: Americana music for the 4th all day today. Happy Independence Day! |
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06/23/17: Well at least I was able to recover the DAT files that contained the list of tracks in the library the day of the crash so I will be able to compose a list of missing tracks. Problem is converting those files into usable data is a very slow painstaking process. |
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05/03/17: While searching through our music library to prepare a memorial video for Frances a network error caused our entire music collection to be erased. Our last backup had about 10,000 less tracks in it. We have tried several different data recovery programs and have determined they are lost forever. It will take us some time to get back to where we were. Meanwhile we are running on the backup system. I lost my voice after the yelling stopped, or the yelling stopped because I lost my voice, can’t remember which. |
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05/01/17: It is with heavy hearts and teary swollen eyes that we report the sudden and unexpected passing of Frances, DJ Ladyhawk’s Mother, at 4:30 PM today. This started on Friday with a phone call that she had a problem with shortness of breath and as a precaution was taken to the local hospital. After talking to the hospital staff over the phone the prognosis was good, that she was stable and there was nothing serious to worry about. After some discussion between Ladyhawk and I it was decided that she would fly out in the morning and bee there to see to her care with the goal to get her well and out of the hospital. We know from past experience that it is always best to have a loved one there as a patient advocate. DJL arrived at the hospital early Saturday morning and found her mother in good spirits and mostly stable. She was a little swollen, but that was not out of the ordinary for her. But then test results started coming in and the overall picture started to change. Both DJL and I have medical backgrounds and know just enough to understand the implications of the test results we were seeing. Her history is not healthy by any means. We were used to seeing the test numbers reflecting her pre-existing conditions but these were worse. Without getting into a lot of detail things went south pretty fast. This happens with the very old and young because neither have enough reserves to deal with wild swings in body chemistry. By Saturday evening she was in guarded condition, retaining 100% of all fluids, not responding to medications designed to combat that, totally unresponsive (comatose), and on a non-intubated ventilator (BiPAP). By Sunday evening she was critical, on dialysis and still on the vent. Mid day on Monday, after agonizing over how much do you put someone you love through to save them and what would be left of their life even if by some miracle they were to survive, we decided to stop treatment. Dialysis was stopped mid stream on her third series and the vent was removed. Shortly after that Frances opened her eyes and began talking. She recognized her daughter and other friends in attendance in the room. Talked about having seen old past pets and her late husband who passed some 21 years ago, DJL’s Father, That “I have a date with your Father” with a big smile on her face. Asked about me and how her baby’s are doing (our two dogs, Percy & Bandit, and her 14 year old Schnauzer, Angle who was not allowed to go with her to her new home). They talked for a short while about funny things from the past, family, and friends. It was a short period of near full consciousness that was a blessing, DJL got to say goodbye to her Mother. A few short hours later, medicated to keep her comfortable, she passed away.
Now every time I hear Sail by Awolnation (her favorite song) I cry. In time, I hope that turns into a smile. |
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04/23/17: Update on Mom. Wow she is doing so well up there. Sore from the extra activity but having a blast with old friends and making new ones. We set her up with a new laptop, with a link to the station stream on the desktop of course, so she can listen to the station up there. She always had the station playing on her clock radio in her bedroom here. It is as I said before strangely quiet here now and there is just something missing from our days now. It is an unexpected strange void that I guess only empty-nesters would relate too. |
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04/19/17: We found out that having a dual WAN connection does have its drawbacks. Any service that requires a static IP like accessing the CPanel at our web hosting company to administer our website will not work. It expects us to stay connected under one IP throughout the session and a dual WAN setup in load balance mode is constantly switching between the two static IP addresses. So in order to update this page for instance we have to unplug one of the WAN connections to force it to use just one IP.
DJ Ladyhawk’s mother started a new chapter of her life today at one of the highest rated advanced care facilities in the state of Florida. She was pleasantly surprised to find many old friends living there as well and is looking forward to being active again with all the things to do and people to see. |
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03/23/17: Well so far so good. The new firmware seems to have corrected the issue with the router. The defective Tripp Lite UPS has been replaced with an APC 1500 Smart UPS and is being managed by our domain controller server. Our network configuration is a dual WAN Router. We used to have it set up in backup mode using our Comcast 150 Mbps line as the primary WAN and AT&T’s lower tier DSL as failover which by itself would not support the station. We changed to AT&T Uverse 48 Mbps and set the router to load balancing mode which should help minimize outages.
Seems like we are the only ones using the request line these days. Not sure why this is. If you are scared off by having to put in a name and location on the request form please don’t be. You can put whatever you wish in those fields, like “me”, “At Office” Those fields are for a feature we are not yet using. This feature will match the name left with an audio file corresponding to that name so what you would hear is something like “Here is a request from Bob in Florida”. But as you can imagine, having to record a request intro for every name and location possible is almost an impossible task that we have not chosen to tackle yet.
Total donations to date: $110 |
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02/23/17: It comes in clusters I guess. The dual WAN router locked up again and had to be rebooted which brought the station down for a few minutes. Speculation is the UPS failure caused corruption in the router’s software. I upgraded the firmware to see if that will fix it. If it continues to happen I will have to replace it. The reason for that is fixing it means resetting it to factory defaults and reprogramming it to our needs. Doing that would mean bringing the station down for an extended period of time which I am not comfortable with. Buying a new one and programming it completely offline means only a couple minutes down time to switch out routers. Then the old one can be redone and held in reserve for the next time a problem arises. The day before that I brought the whole system down to install the UPS bypass switches and do some software updates. After being able to bypass the affected UPS I changed out the supposed bad batteries just to learn it is not the 3 year old batteries causing the problem, the Tripp Lite UPS itself is bad just 4 months out of warranty. The UPS is falsely reporting the battery voltage about 3 volts lower than actual readings, Incoming AC voltage 11 volts lower that actual and outgoing AC voltage 60 volts higher than actual. I am replacing it with an APC this time. I found a solution to monitoring and reporting loss of internet. A free internet based service offering 50 monitors checked at 5 minute intervals and email notification sent to my cell phone when any IP, URL, or Port I set up is not reachable. Works great! It is called Up Time Robot.
Total donations to date: $110 |
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02/20/17: For the second time this month, which is highly unusual, the station was down for an extended period of time today. DJ Ladyhawk came home from work about 8pm and told me she couldn’t get the station at work that day and assumed that her IT Dept had blocked it. But after I looked into it the router had locked up about at about 2am. Again without Internet connectivity no alert emails could be sent. So now I am searching for a way to get my monitoring system to be able to make an outbound call on the land line when Internet Communications are down. Again send me an email if you know of such a program. I listened all day via FM so I didn’t notice a thing.
The Tripp Lite UPS Software is being a pain in the ass. I have two identical UPS in two different locations so monitored locally by two different computers. The PowerAlert Agent on one locks up every 3 or 4 hours and every 2 or 3 days on the other. Unplugging and reconnecting the USB cable usually fixes it but damn what a pain in the ass. Stupid crap is supposed to just work. So much for being able to monitor the UPS. Guess I will have to spend some time with their tech support people. I hate when they go through their play book. “Did you try rebooting your computer, did you try power cycling your UPS, did you try…” & on & on. Yes I did that’s why I am calling you dummy! =) Wish me luck. |
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02/16/17: If you were listening yesterday you noticed that the station went off the air at about 2pm EST. I apologize for that. Normally I get an alert any time something is having trouble here but when the UPS supporting the network (Modems, Routers, Switches) fails there is no way to send the alert. I was out of the studio and when I returned later that afternoon I knew something was wrong when my Smartphone did not automatically connect to the WAN. The cause was one of the batteries in the UPS had suddenly failed during a 20 second brownout. One of those failures where even a self test on the UPS causes a failure without an alert being sent, the UPS simply turns off and stays off even when line power is restored. When the Smart1500LCDT UPS is restarted it says the battery is fine and has an hour’s worth of run time available. The battery shows full voltage till a load is put on it then it goes to zero in a nanosecond when a load is applied. I looked into redundant parallel UPS systems, yah right, tens of thousands of dollars and start in the 10KW range. I looked for hacks online to parallel two small UPS but no such luck. If anyone knows of a way to do that send me an email. Then when I got the power back up, I am still waiting for replacement batteries, I had all sorts of other problems. Routers didn’t want to cooperate, RAID Arrays were degraded, Check disk found hard drive errors, station computer didn’t want to start… Very frustrating! So I put UPS Management software on my domain controller to monitor all my UPS with the addition of a battery age past 3 years alert so I can replace them hopefully before they go bad. I also ordered UPS Bypass Switches so I can take a UPS offline without turning off the equipment it serves. Those things are expensive too! |
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01/20/17: DJ Ladyhawk’s Mother has not bounced back from her cancer surgery the way we had hoped and has become fully dependant on others for every aspect of life. After our caring for her in our home for the last 11 years is has become necessary to move her to a facility where professionals can give her the 24/7 care she now needs. I always know when Sail by Awolnation is playing because she turns up her clock radio every time it plays, it is her favorite song. It will be strangely quite here after she leaves. Total donations to date: $110 |
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01/01/17: Another year has started and we hope everyone has a wonderful time throughout 2017! |
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And Jill Radio © 2017 All Rights Reserved