Baltimore Area Scout Tweeters

The Sep/Oct 2009 (Baltimore) Area Scouter lists twitter IDs for a few staffers. I'm following most of them, but they aren't saying much. Here's the list I collected:


id . . . . . . . tweets
sonyagreene . . .4
stevebortz . . . protected / requested
kathyherche . . .2
ghurt32 . . . . .0 [new]
Casey_Snyder . . 30
bsacarroll . . . 153
Jim_Barton1952 . 0
luihernandez . . 17
Brian_Debease . .protected / requested
hteller . . . . .0
RiverTerp08 . . .2
MrsCityScouter . 31
mcclellandkevin .23
ahutton0 . . . . 0


I was already following those not protected from view, except one.

The Council Chief Scout has had more to say:


id . . . . . . . tweets
EthanDraddy . . .906


But I have been doing this a while longer:



id . . . . . . . tweets
jspath55 . . . . 7312

A trip to the Hardware Store

Once again, I found a project that required a trip to Hodges Hardware.

To fix a lamp for my Mom, I needed a socket, plug, lamp cord, and craft glue; the glue to replace the felt on the bottom that I will need to tear off to get the old cord off. The other parts should be self-explanatory.

The filing system at Hodges must be experienced first hand. It is nearly always faster to wait in line for the key cuts, glass and screen door repairs, and propane tank refills and just ask for a part. The staff knows right where everything is, and even more, knows where the part you really wanted and didn't know to ask for, how to describe, much less knew it existed.

I found the socket after prowling the aisles, couldn't find just the right plug, did find the glue, but totally missed the lamp cord. It's in the back room where paint, blinds and other household repair items are. The clerk said "pick out what you want, bring it up and I'll cut it."

Here's what I faced:





The brown cord was behind the white spaghetti on the middle right side of the image.

I'm now confident this lamp will light up again.

Scout Camp The Movie - A Review of Sorts

I watched "Scout Camp - The Movie" on DVD over a couple nights last week. I would have shared it with my troop, but the Scoutmaster and SPL went on vacation, and I like to keep my Netflix queue churning. Can rent and/or buy later.

Though Netflix had said there was a delay, the movie shipped right away after it came to the top of my list. This is a review (of sorts), but a little background. I heard about the movie a few weeks ago, but then looked for it online.

• @LatterDay_Scout Thanks for the "Scout Camp" movie tip and @ScoutCamper link too. Added to my #netflix queue: "long wait" :) 7:56 AM Aug 5th from web in reply to LatterDay_Scout

http://twitter.com/jspath55/statuses/3417853754

• Home from meeting at Baltimore Area Council and meanwhile Netflix has delivered "Scout Camp" ( #scouts the movie). Maybe tomorrow night zzzz
• 9:29 PM Aug 19th from web

After I posting that, I got replies:

• @jspath55 love to hear what you think of #scoutcampthemovie ? 12:59 AM Aug 20th from TweetDeck in reply to jspath55
• http://twitter.com/threecoinpro
  

So, a few of my takes:

• I enjoyed the movie, on the whole, and particularly liked the Spirit Stick emphasis, although I failed to see the point of the "free sticks" subplot.
• The scenes with Scouts doing flag ceremonies, falling out, patrol yells, and general pranks were about as accurate as you can get, without resorting to plain silliness or typical Hollywood script-by-committee tinkering. Likewise with uniform wear.
• Biggest downside from my view was lack of 2-deep leadership in many situations. We don't go on solo trips. Dangerous in several ways.
  
• Do not miss the outtakes with the assistant directors [incorrectly] herding cattle. I was tipped off to this with the altered text of "no animals were harmed during the making of this film. However..."
• Troops are rather on the Caucasian side. But, that's probably a truism, unfortunately. Working on it.
  

Now, how will we use this film? It's definitely superior, from a reality check standpoint, than the training clips distributed at round table and similar sessions. Will it recruit more boys into Scouting? Possibly, though my guess will be it will help Webelos and other Cubs get a better idea of what camp is like than the brochures and web sites tell them, much less the incomplete (almost said incoherent - and realized that is untrue) stories from our not-yet-First Class Scouts.

Links:

• http://twitter.com/ScoutCamper
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Scout-Camp/31463653713
• http://krustbuster.com/
• http://scoutcampthemovie.com/
• http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Scout_Camp/70121504
  
  
  

p.s. They're going to need to alter the lettering from this:



To this:



:-)

Trail work at Camp Saffran

We were asked to upgrade water bars on the trail between Lookout cabin, Timberline adirondack and the Nentico Pavilion. A couple of the "before" shots depict the prior water bars, steps, or 2x8 dirt barriers installed with the runoff slope facing up the trail instead of down, weathered or kicked away, or only part way across the trail.


Before



During




















The 'During' photos show a bit of the work done by Troop 350, starting with 6x6 treated lumber at the top, pieces rescued from a previous live elsewhere on the reservation.

Stakes were made on site, with points sharpened and the other end wrapped to prevent splitting during installation.

Lower water bars were made from various tree limbs found around camp, such as Scoutcraft, Pioneering and a couple of fire rings. The largest limb is about a foot in diameter.


After

Only 1 'after' picture is shown, although a couple of the 'during' pictures depict the troop testing the stability of the installed logs. We watched as Scouts moved up and down the trail to see if the distance between water bars was correct, and if there was any motion of the logs.

We finished 6 of the water bars, ending up removing one older step that was loose and just backflling the area. Several Scouts commented we should have one more at the lower point of the trail, but as we ran out of time during our Summer camp week we deferred that to another day.

Blue, Red Yellow trails

On the second full day of Scout camp, I took a morning hike up the Blue trail from Camp Saffran toward Camp Finney and the new water front. I only had about 3 hours before lunch, not to mention it was quite sticky.

I sent time recording locations of trees across the trail, other than small or dead ones I could remove. After meeting the Red trail, I took that to where it meets the Yellow trail at Broad Creek. Along the way I knocked out a few more Broad Creek Hiker patch questions. The answer to #5 was hard to find, even with a GPS, though the number marker was easily visible.

I doubled back up to the Blue Trail for a short tangent, but didn't make it to the waterfront as time was passing. The bird feather in the trail was on BigFoot Road.

More camp fun the rest of the week!

Hacking a rechargeable camp lantern

I had a basic 6 volt lantern that used standard dry volt batteries, but decided to try to update it to use rechargeable lead acid power supply after disassembling a lantern I bought a few years ago. The fancy one came with a solar panel, a 12 volt car adapter and a 120 volt wall transformer, and included an LED lamp as well as a fluorescent bulb, with a switch for either or both light sources.

The friendly folk at Baynesville Electronics set me up with a "super bright" LED bulb ($2.79) and a pack of 68 Ohm resistors (4 for $1.39). The LED part number is NTE30045 (NTE Inc. link). Oh, yeah, and a couple spade connectors for 35 cents each. Both were red, so I marked one with black magic marker. I also used red and black wire, so that should keep the polarities straight.



First problem was unexpected - while the old and new batteries were about the same size, the wet cell was a bit taller, so the lid didn't fit back on. I chipped off 2 of 4 fins that were in the bottom to keep the square dry cell from spinning.

Then it was time to dip into the parts box for soldering iron, wire, and, eventually, a switch. I was unable to reuse the existing switch as I had to break off part of the metal ring to keep the new battery from shorting, and could not get a wire to stick to the remaining section. It might be aluminum; I'm not sure.

The next to last shot shows the LED bulb lighting up the scene; the last shot was after all the switch rewiring. I believe it should be pretty easy to pull this battery out and swap it into the larger lantern with the solar panel feed.

The battery itself came from an Amazon reseller. SKU was UVUB645F1. Two of them showed up within a couple business days. My only complaint was the weak packaging - both batteries were in thin cardboard boxes, stuck in a padded mailing envelope. At least one of the terminal protection plastic terminals had slipped loose, and the cardboard boxes were torn a little from the mail handling.

We'll see how the light does at camp this week!

Dog days of summer

Like a lot of projects, my Crumbs From The Spork blog posts have slowed down lately. It's not that I haven't been writing, it's that a lot of it is for work, with non-disclosure content. I did a bit of work getting WordPress installed on my NetBSD machine,thanks to a few links out there which I will recapitulate RSN (real soon now). I've been writing under SharePoint at work (about 70 blogs there in about 6 months), am nigh onto 150 blogs on the SAP SCN site, and generally tweeting short bursts of what has been called my inner monologue.

I also have been shooting Bengies Drive-In Theatre marquee changes nearly every weekend that it's been open this year. Here's one:

From Bengies

What else? Upgraded to NetBSD 5.0; trying to work through how to cutover to X11r7, the first dot release change to X Windows in a few years. Putting stuff onto Google Earth via Panaramio. Doing some geocoding of hikes and trails.

From Crumbs from the spork