Life lessons from fishing

Goals Say you start the outing with the goal of bringing in a big bass. This could be like the life goal of landing your dream job with better salary. Changing the lure You get to fishing the lake and you're not having any luck bringing in the fish of your dreams. This is like trying to get that dream job. So, you have a couple of options; change your location, change your goal and self improvement. Changing your location This is pretty self explanatory. If you're fishing the bank, keep moving around. If you can get out on the water. If that's not working change lakes! Life story, work the job, angle for promotions. Move to another department or division for promotion or change jobs to get that raise. Changing the goal Maybe you are satisfied to not get the big bass. You've resigned yourself that they just aren't biting right now. Change your goal to fishing for panfish. Land one and be happy. This is like a soft job market. It's going to be tough to increase the income level for now so change the goal to be do the one thing I need to do that will best increase my marketability when the market firms up. Self-Education Read and study up on knots, lures, equipment and techniques. Practice before you get to the water. Life story, while you're away from work learn new skills that improve your marketability and potential wage earning capability. Maybe these new skills will give you the edge in landing that big bass (job). Networking Talk to other fisherman. Learn from them. They know the lay of the land. They have a feel for what lures work, the times of day and the hazards. In life your network can help you improve your work skills, tell you how to get through the red tape and warn you about the politics of the situation. And they can help you land that big bass. Success When it's all done, you can rest satisified. You did the best you could. You landed three bass and two crappie. None of them the dream bass you're after but you've learned, built relationships and had fun.

Busy day with webapp

Well, spent a bunch of time working on an ASP.Net application today. I haven't done much at all with ASP.Net so there was a bit of head pounding. However, by days end I had forms authentication set up. A table with the UserID, Password, etc info was built on SQL Server. Using stored procedures to get what I need. Getting the spike solution integrated into the real application proved to be a little interesting. I was running into issues because I hadn't remembered to abandon my session authentication between test runs. I got the application set up to be cookieless and save all state information with a state server hosted on separate machine. Had to edit the registry to permit non-local users to connect to the service. Then I was able to set some session variables for the application. Then I did some refactoring and created a common logout function for the application. I also set up the application to get configuration (connection) information from the web.config. So finally feeling like I had accomplished something, it was time to go home. It was a beautiful ride home on the Harley. It was extremely hard to keep from flexing the wrist. The icing on the evening was catching a couple of crappie right off the bank (they were nesting). Then I reeled in a nice small mouth bass with my ultra-lite combo. Now to get some rest before getting back at it tomorrow.

ColdHeat Soldering Iron

I just received a ColdHeat Soldering Iron as a gift. https://www.asseenontvnetwork.com/vcc/coldheat/coldheat/115785/  It's a pretty slick little device.  The two big things that caught my attention are that it's cordless and they claim that the tip cools off near instantly.  Well after working with it a little bit I can say the following:

Don't plan to use it for really fine work.   It has a split tip that works more like a welder than a soldering iron.

It works best on smaller gauge wire.  Seems like it would be great for splicing wires in the field.

My initial assessment is I don't think it would work well to solder coax or coax connectors.  Because of the mass involved with the coax braid and the connectors I think it would be tough for this device to heat them up well.  I think with larger wires and connectors we'll see lots of cold solder joints using this device.

Overall, I like it for it's intended use, soldering small gauge wires together in the field.  This will come in handy for antenna work.