Thursday July 13, 2006

Gas is down to $2.94/gall. Funny how saving an entire 5¢/gallon can make you feel better. Do you realize that is saving $1.50 on the big van and $.60 on the small van to fill the entire tank?

We have decided to sell the hay baler and the tractor.

The tractor is an Allis-Chalmers RC serial #RC4201 with a WC engine. It runs but there is coolant in the oil and one of the back rims are rusted thru (as in half the bead is about to fall off). It comes with original RC front wheels, extra flywheel, rear PTO, side PTO, RC rear axle/gearset. It has electric start but the generator and starter are both dead.

The baler is a self powered New Holland Model 66 SN #16506. We have baled with it the last few years but last year with about 50 bales to go the wadboard shattered. We installed a new wadboard and retimed it. Testing in the yard it appeared to work OK, but when we started baling the plunger hit the wadboard and crunched both it and the knives and blew out most of the shear pins and shear bolts. Frame, knotters, body, etc are in good shape, some surface rust. Engine is a 2 cylinder Wisconsin, runs OK. Fuel pump quit a couple of years ago, we have been using a gravity feed tank. Hand start magneto ignition.

We are asking $500 obo each for the baler and the tractor, buyer responsible for picking them up from where I have them sitting at.

If interested I can be contacted by leaving a comment here or by emailing me at sales at hartshorn dot org.

Time for me to get to work now.

Wednesday July 12, 2006

Time to make Hay!

Matt got the baler working (I think; we haven't tested it yet). Now the tractor has problems, there is coolant in the oil and the tube is coming thru a rust spot in the rim, so we are NOT going to use it.

Fired up the old Ford pick up yesterday and mowed about half a field. We will try raking the field today with the truck

EMail Server is down, so I can't check/send email, and I am getting further and further behind.

Monday July 10, 2006

It's been over a month so I thought I should post SOMETHING on here. Hate to leave everyone totally disappointed.

Gas has been at $2.99 for the last week after bouncing all over for the two previous weeks.

I'm playing with Windows Vista and Office 2007 these days (in between network and phone sysem admin).

So far, I'm not terribly impressed with Vista. I was looking forward to some new functionality, but most of that (especially the new file system) got dropped. Although there is supposedly a lot of new stuff under the skin (I don't know; I'm not a programmer) it looks like WinXP with a new skin that leans quite a bit towards the Mac. More of the bones are hidden, security settings have been tightened up. I think that it will make user administration easier since there is far less stuff for the user to hose up, but if you like to tweak your system (Power Users?) then you will be very frustrated at first. Since I've only got maybe 5 hours on it so far I am hoping that I can get used to the new way of doing things. It's been five years now since I have had to learn a new OS, and I still like WinXP very much. I do note that Vista is a memory hog, I'm running it on a P4 3.0 with 512 ram, and I think that 1 gig of ram would help a lot.

Still arguing with VoIP. Complaints are fewer but I still get some about the noise and dropped connections on the IP phones. Anything new that I am hooking up and those who complain loudly are getting digital phone sets, which is getting some people upset because I am giving then the "old phones" instead of the "new phones". Doesn't matter that the "old" phones are new out of the box with the same features and are far more reliable with better sound quality than the "new" phones, they just want a "new" phone. And when I take away the "new" phone from a loud complainer and give them an "old" phone they complain even louder. Ya just can't please some people.

I am still of the opinion that VoIP is not ready for the "Big Time" yet and that it shouldn't be used in mission critical situations and that it should be rolled out in small groups. It was a bad idea to try to roll out some 300 VoIP phones at one time. I had expected that with an entirely new hardware infrastructure including switches and QOS that the problems would be minimal, but it just wasn't so.

Now I need to start rolling out my wireless access points. They are all piled on my desk; I just need to starting putting them in place.