Google Plus - did I need it ?

Google told me I needed it, but I didn't think so.
If you are very active like having a Blog or on YouTube You almost have to sign up.
See my great new Google + page at:
google.com/+JackDemaree

A look back - 2013

See the hundreds of past photos of mine.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/yourphotos?cfem=1

Happy New Year 2014

Is that a Rolex watch ?

The Witness to War Foundation

The Witness to War Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to preserving the stories and unique experiences of combat veterans. It was founded in an attempt to answer the unanswerable: What was it like to be there?
These are the stories of scared 18 and 19 year olds thrust into circumstances of such intensity and violence, that they became the defining moments of their lives. - See more at: http://www.witnesstowar.org/#sthash.w2OAGPxL.dpuf

Busching Bridge Holiday Card

Every year I receive requests for the Busching Bridge Holiday Card, as always it is located at:
http://wb9otx.com/card/
You can always find all of my pages at:
http://ripleycounty.net
and/or
http://wb9otx.com
The Java app is safe, so you can disregard the warning that pops up......Jack

Merry Christmas

Fake Adobe Flash Player Installer and Redirect Virus

I must eat grow today, as I have bragged in the past that I never get viruses or malware. Today I find I am infected with the Fake Adobe Flash Player Installer virus/malware. Where did I Get it? I do not have a clue. I don't do program cracks or porn, but one of the pages I looked at dumped the fake updater on my computer. Fortunately it is one that is fairly easy to get rid of. I used MalwareBytes, ran a quick scan and it cleaned it off completely. There are other programs that will remove it also, some are talked about in the video. 
See the YouTube Video
Be careful and watch what you click on....... Jack

Know what your buying

A friend of mine ask if I could set up his laptop to receive mail, I said sure. But when I saw it, it was a Chrome book. No way could I load a mail program on it (like Outlook, Thunderbird, & etc) I ask, where did you buy it? He replied WalMart, I said, Take it back and buy a Windows machine......... Jack


See it full size on YouTube

Advanced SystemCare Ultimate 7

This is a program that will run very well in the unregistered mode. If you are a slight bit advanced or a geeky user you will like this utility. If you are not a geek don't change stuff if you don't know what your changing........ Jack

Based on #1 ranked BitDefender antivirus technology and IObit anti-malware engine, Advanced SystemCare Ultimate 7 incorporates top anti-virus capabilities, as well as the already proven comprehensive PC tune-up ability. It provides protection against all kinds of security threats, system slowdown, freeze and crash without slowing down your system.
Download and read more

Winter arrives December 21

As the winter arrives, the sun's maximum elevation during the day, the elevation at noon, gets lower. This maximum elevation attains its lowest value at the winter solstice and after that it starts to increase.
When it is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, it is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.
Read More

The Moon

When I awoke this morning I seen the perfect round moon on the West horizon.  What a beautiful sight..... Jack

Click to enlarge

The Moon is the only natural satellite of Earth and the fifth largest moon in the Solar System. Owing to its synchronous rotation around Earth, the Moon always shows the same face: its near side, which is marked by dark volcanic maria as well as the bright ancient crustal highlands and the prominent impact craters. Here, the Moon was near its greatest northern ecliptic latitude, so the southern craters are especially prominent.
Read More at Wikipedia.

110th Anniversary of Wright Brothers' First Flight

NORTH CAROLINA -- Dec. 17 holds a very special place in history. It's the day Orville and Wilbur Wright took to the air for the first successful flight.It happened just east of the Triad in Kitty Hawk. WFMY News 2's Chad Silber found out how that day 110 years ago paved the way for future flight in the Triad. The flight lasted a mere 12 seconds and 120 feet, but it forever changed the way we look at travel. It continues to be a guideline for advancing aviation here in the  riad.
Read more at digtriad.com
The Wright brothers,were two American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who were credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight, on December 17, 1903. From 1905 to 1907, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft. Although not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.
Read more at wikipedia

Winter Power Outage Tips

Click to enlarge 

The following tips are republished from a press release issued by the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) on October 30, 2006.  Photo was taken Mar. 8th, 2008 in my driveway.
See the tips

The Big Wheel Story (a classic)

This little story makes it's rounds every year starting just past Thanksgiving time and it floats about the USA and maybe the world till past Christmas. As far as I know this story is true, I knew the owner, the waitress, and the building that has sense burned down.  It seems the facts of the basic story stay the same, almost word for word, but at the end there may be a paragraph added that tells the reader that they may be hit by lightning if they don't forward it to 222 people in the next 15 minutes. Read it where you find it - maybe print it for reading next year - It is a great story that I have been reading for years...... Jack

Click to enlarge

...........................................
In September 1960, I woke up one morning with six hungry babies and just 75 cents in my pocket. Their father was gone. The boys ranged from three months to seven years; their sister was two. Their Dad had never been much more than a presence they feared. Whenever they heard his tires crunch on the gravel driveway they would scramble to hide under their beds. He did manage to leave $15 a week to buy groceries. Now that he had decided to leave, there would be no more beatings, but no food either. If there was a welfare system in effect in southern Indiana at that time, I certainly knew nothing about it. I scrubbed the kids until they looked brand new and then put on my best homemade dress. I loaded them into the rusty old 51 Chevy and drove off to find a job. The seven of us went to every factory, store and restaurant in our small town. No luck. The kids stayed crammed into the car and tried to be quiet while I tried to convince whomever would listen that I was willing to learn or do anything. I had to have a job. Still no luck. The last place we went to, just a few miles out of town, was an old Root Beer Barrel drive-in that had been converted to a truck stop. It was called the Big Wheel. An old lady named Granny owned the place and she peeked out of the window from time to time at all those kids. She needed someone on the graveyard shift, 11 at night until seven in the morning. She paid 65 cents an hour and I could start that night. I raced home and called the teenager down the street that baby-sat for people. I bargained with her to come and sleep on my sofa for a dollar a night. She could arrive with her pajamas on and thekids would already be asleep. This seemed like a good arrangement to her, so we made a deal. That night when the little ones and I knelt to say our prayers we all thanked God for finding Mommy a job. And so I started at the Big Wheel. When I got home in the mornings I woke the baby-sitter up and sent her home with one dollar of my tip money--fully half of what I averaged every night. As the weeks went by, heating bills added a strain to my meager wage. The tires on the old Chevy had the consistency of penny balloons and began to leak. I had to fill them with air on the way to work and again every morning before I could go home. One bleak fall morning, I dragged myself to the car to go home and found four tires in the back seat. New tires ! There was no note, no nothing, just those beautiful brand new tires. Had angels taken up residence in Indiana? I wondered. I made a deal with the local service station. In exchange for his mounting the new tires, I would clean up his office. I remember it took me a lot longer to scrub his floor than it did for him to do the tires. I was now working six nights instead of five and it still wasn't enough. Christmas was coming and I knew there would be no money for toys for the kids. I found a can of red paint and started repairing and painting some old toys. Then I hid them in the basement so there would be something for Santa to deliver on Christmas morning. Clothes were a worry too. I was sewing patches on top of patches on the boys pants and soon they would be too far gone to repair. On Christmas Eve the usual customers were drinking coffee in the Big Wheel. These were the truckers, Les, Frank, and Jim, and a state trooper named Joe. A few musicians were hanging around after a gig at the Legion and were dropping nickels in the pinball machine. The regulars all just sat around and talked through the wee hours of the morning and then left to get home before the sun! came up. When it was time for me to go home at seven o'clock on Christmas morning I hurried to the car. I was hoping the kids wouldn't wake up before I managed to get home and get the presents from the basement and place them under the tree. (We had cut down a small cedar tree by the side of the road down by the dump.) It was still dark and I couldn't see much, but there appeared to be some dark shadows in the car-or was that just a trick of the night? Something certainly looked different, but it was hard to tell what. When I reached the car I peered warily into one of the side windows. Then my jaw dropped in amazement. My old battered Chevy was filled full to the top with boxes of all shapes and sizes. I quickly opened the driver's side door, scrambled inside and kneeled in the front facing the back seat. Reaching back, I pulled off the lid of the top box. Inside was whole case of little blue jeans, sizes 2-10.  I looked inside another box: It was full of shirts to go with the jeans. Then I peeked inside someof the other boxes: There was candy and nuts and bananas and bags of groceries. There was an enormous ham for baking, and canned vegetables and potatoes. There was pudding and Jell-O and cookies, pie filling and flour. There was a whole bag of laundry supplies and cleaning items. And there were five toy trucks and one beautiful little doll. As I drove back through empty streets as the sun slowly rose on most amazing Christmas Day of my life, I was sobbing with gratitude. And I will never forget the joy on the faces of my little ones that precious morning. Yes, there were angels in Indiana that long-ago December. And they all hung out at the Big Wheel truck stop.

Friday the 13th

Several theories have been proposed about the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition.
One theory states that it is a modern amalgamation of two older superstitions: that 13 is an unlucky number and that Friday is an unlucky day.
Read More

First transatlantic radio signal

Dec. 12th, 1901
Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio signal, from Poldhu Wireless Station in Cornwall, England, to Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland.
Read more at:
http://earlyradiohistory.us/1902marc.htm

Radio has came a long way, My beacon transmitter (WB9OTX/B) using less power than your car's tail light (5 Watts) is heard almost daily in Europe..... Jack

State Trooper Recalls Christmas Eve

in memory  of Norman Huelson

See it full size on YouTube

Thank you Ken for this link

Why is the Ocean Salty?

You may know that the oceans cover about 70 percent of the Earth's surface, and that about 97 percent of all water on and in the Earth is saline—there's a lot of salty water on our planet. By some estimates, if the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth's land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet (166 meters) thick, about the height of a 40-story office building (NOAA). But, where did all this salt come from? If you get into folk stories and mythology you will see that almost every culture has a story explaining how the oceans became salty. The answer is really very simple. Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land. Here's how it works.
Read More

December 7th, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II.
Read the FULL STORY

See my past posts on the attack

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Pearl Harbor Address
See More Photos

How much will it snow

In your City or Town


In Versailles, Indiana

Operation Crossroads

Operation Crossroads was a series of two nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946 to investigate the effect of such weapons on naval ships. They were the first nuclear detonations after World War II, and the first ever to be publicly announced beforehand and observed by an invited audience, including a large press corps. A fleet of 95 target ships was assembled in Bikini Lagoon and hit with two detonations of Fat Man plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapons of the type dropped on Nagasaki, each with a yield of 23 kt (96 TJ). The first test, Able, was an air burst that sank five ships and demonstrated the survivability of ships located more than 1 kilometer (0.62 mi) from the explosion. The second test, Baker, was an underwater explosion (pictured), which effectively destroyed the entire target fleet with radioactive contamination. It was the first case of immediate, concentrated radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. The fallout from Baker and subsequent Bikini tests still renders the area uninhabitable. Glenn Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, called Baker "the world's first nuclear disaster.
Read (Full article...)