RadioActivity

Life is Good!

Right now, I work the evening shift, I'm always off by midnight. I also have a funky schedule where I'm off Friday nights. Friday nights have become a thing in my house where we have supper together, and watch a family movie. Right now, we're going through the Star Wars series of movies. We just finished Episode III and couple of weeks ago, and Episode IV last friday. The kids have really enjoyed it. Their friends at school talk Star Wars, so it's good for them to have a frame of reference.

After Episode III, everyone went to bed, but me; I was wide awake. I decided to head out to the shack, and was glad I did. I made several contacts very quickly, and came back inside. Soon, I was in the bed, before midnight even! I did discover that my NoGA Twin Tube 80 is out of commission again. I'll have to trouble shoot that later. Winter's over, so 80 is getting noisy again. Last week,

I got my log caught up, and even found time for a few more contacts. Slowly but surely, I'm logging contacts this year. It's got to get out to the shack and enjoy myself. Sometimes I just clean off the desk (there's always a mess). Sometimes, I just check the tuner setting for the W3EDP. Occasionally, I check into the SoCARS net (10360 is my bus ticket number).When school (for me) ends at the end of April, and I switch jobs, my availability to do things will change too. I hope I can go to field day this year!

Life is Good!
On to the next project, I need to get another antenna up. I'm still working on it. When I can. Not stressing out about it. Still working on portable operations. When I can. Like I said, I'm keeping things fun.

Things I've Learned

I Learned some interesting things about JavaScript.
It started with an assignment, and I just had a moment to hack out what it was I was discovering during spring break last week.
First thing:
When using JavaScript, you have to be mindful of your objects. It's very easy to change them, because when you pass an object to a variable, you pass the reference, and not just the values. In other words, the variable is the object, and not a copy of it. I captured this behavior in the screenshot below.

Screen shot of JavaScript and output

Another thing I learned:
Double quotes can bite you. When using a button to perform an action, I was having difficulty passing a parameter to a function. The reason why is because I had to pass the parameter using double quotes (it was a string id of a page element). I discovered that when you create a button, it's best to pass the action of the button in double-quotes. I then had to pass the parameter in single-quotes The code looked something like this:


getComp is a function I wrote to display the attributes of objects, hal2000 is the object whose attributes I will display, and conComp is the id of a p tag in the HTML of the page. I use it to display the object's attributes.
If I left out the 'conComp' part, and modified the function so it wasn't necessary (I hard coded a particular ID in place), then worked just fine. I even tried to single quote the second parameter, but that didn't work. The only way the javascript would run right was to Double quote the whole action parameter, and single quote the string parameter passed to the getComp function.

I'm more than halfway done with the school year and I'm learning a lot!