The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Saturday, December 27, 2025

Wait! It's looking like the last US launch of '25 is Sunday night

Sunday night, not tonight. The scheduled time of 9:08 was still ahead as I sat to type this, as the launch was scrubbed with just over 37 minutes on the clock. This was before the SpaceFlight Now video feed for the mission started, and I only learned later, closer to 9:30 local that it was due to "a ground systems issue at its launch pad" and not the Falcon 9 or the payload.

Current schedule is Sunday 12/28 at the same time: 9:08 ET or 6:08 PT at Vandenberg.

We had something pop up today that was unexpected and brought a larger impact than I might have thought it would bring. No, it wasn't a major appliance failure, it wasn't even something bigger and worse than the sink faucet I had to replace. Our internet connection went down for around 4-1/2 to 5 hours.

What was bigger than expected was now much was affected by that. Since we "cut the cord" seven years ago and don't have cable TV, we've been getting our TV from streaming services (currently mostly Hulu). We're in a part of Florida that doesn't have much TV that can be gotten with the outdoor antenna. Of course, the streaming TV comes over the same cable as the internet. That meant the only diversionary entertainment we had was over the air radio. "Great wasteland" is a good descriptor for local AM or FM radio. Well, the ham radio station is still usable and I spent some time playing with that to ensure that it still worked and was still usable, as it was. It seems like it will take more effort to keep that going more than a day or two without the internet, though.

The computers were still fully usable, and I worked on research for some tech writing I've been making slow progress on. I can still use CAD, still use all the design software and other special software I have, but I still had issues with the mental side, of not feeling like working on that stuff. I wanted to do what I do most mornings and just cruise the net for a while.

For someone who thinks that they'd be ready for the SHTF event, it was a bit eye opening. I simply wasn't ready to change my life with no or even little warning.