On Monday I was feeling… "not very well". Sore throat, snotty nose, feeling cold and of course very tired. At first I wasn’t too happy with my result overall. It is not a stunning score nor a top level performance from my side. But then again: I knew I was going to be tired and exhausted during the contest. I know my setup has limitations for the nature of CQ WW. And I know that I’m a poor mult scoring operator. So after coming to terms with this, I felt joyful. Nothing like a good long CW bash to clear one’s mind of the daily worries. And I made more +100 QSO/ hour periods than ever before. So I’m a happy camper. Now only draw some conclusions and work on the station’s hardware as time and mood permit.
Now some geek talk coming up. The rest of the week I worked on my ADIF log processing tool for .Net. There was an ASCII parsing process that takes quite some time for larger log and the GUI freezes up until the job is done. Solution: use .Net’s BackGroundWorker class. This simply launches routines in a new thread. Simply? MultiThreading apps are not really that easy for a teach-yourself-programming guy. And I wrongly assumed that reading the file and write it to an array takes a long time but it turns out that displaying the log line per line into a ListBox control is the culprit. So I rewrote the code and put this in a new thread only to find out that addressing user controls in a separate thread ‘may’ cause security errors that ‘may’ result in errors’ to quote MSDN online help. So this problem needs some special attention.</geek talk>
And to finally deal with my aging ‘portable IT warehouse’ I did an upgrade yesterday and I’m now running a reasonably powerful dual core Intel T7500 and 4GB of RAM. I decided to finally plunge into Vista (Home Premium SP1). By now I have mastered XP inside out and am feeling a total n00b once again. Where to find the MAC address to add it to my router’s MAC filtering list? And I was glad to change the GUI theme to ‘Windows Classic’. I have been running XP Pro in that theme too. I like the simple no frills GUI à la Windows 98. I don’t need widgets and flashy desktops. Simple and sober, like myself. You might beg to differ on that one.