Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
The new complete copy of The Art of R Programming arrived from the No Starch folks yesterday (thanks!). No missing pages in this one (at least none that I’ve noticed yet).
(The cover is the same, that’s just the strap from the camera hanging over the book on the right). The new book, naturally, is just a wee bit thicker than the first copy.
Gotta give big props to No Starch for their awesome customer service and sending me a new copy of the book.
Back in Nov 2011, I ordered a copy of The Art of R Programming (published by No Starch Press). It sat on my shelf for a while and I’d flip through it now and then looking up a few things about R when I needed something. It’s a pretty well written book with lots of examples, which I like.
Last night I was looking something up in the index, and when I flipped to the page, I couldn’t find it.
Then I noticed it. Somehow, my copy of the book is missing a pretty large chunk of pages (pages 41-88). What amuses me most is that I never noticed until now.
I mentioned it in a tweet because it amused me and mentioned the @nostarch twitter account just because I thought they’d be amused too. A few hours later, I got a response from Tyler Ortman (@oty)
@imabug @nostarch Sorry about that! Can you email info@nostarch.com? We’ll get you a new file in the morning, figure out what went wrong.
— Tyler Ortman (@oty) March 26, 2013
So I fired off an email like he suggested and am waiting to hear back. This is a nice use of Twitter for customer service.
Update: So not only did No Starch send me a PDF copy of the missing pages, but they’re also going to ship a new copy of the book to me! That’s pretty awesome of them. Thanks No Starch!
As I get more into building electronic things, I’ve come across schematics for various other things that seem like they’d be interesting to build. It’s a progression from assembling kits on boards where everything is laid out already, to building circuits. Maybe I’ll even get to the point where I’m laying out my own circuits and etching boards. Probably not for a while though.
All this leads to the question: Where do I go to find boards, components, connectors, wire, cables and other bits locally?
In this day and age of “disposable electronics”, scavenging parts from the trash pile is an option. However, you’re getting kind of a grab bag of bits that may or may not be immediately useful.
There are online sources like Digikey and Mouser, but then you have to wait for the part to arrive. Normally not a problem, but there might be times when i want/need something soon.
I have the good fortune to have a nearby Radio Shack that still has a decent electronics hobby/DIY section. They’ve been able to supply me with most of the components I’ve needed so far. The selection isn’t huge, but the fact they even have one is impressive. Just about everything I used for the breadboard version of the Morse code oscillator came from there (except for the button)
I’ve had a few people suggest Wholesale Industrial Electronics on the peninsula on East Bay St. Will have to go check them out and see. I wonder if there are any other places for me to go shopping at.
Last summer at one of the radio club meetings, one of the older hams brought in a small stack of QST magazines that he didn’t want any more and asked if I’d be interested in them. Being newly licensed, I said sure!
I’ve gone through them a few times now, and with Connie’s collection of QST, these are duplicates now so I thought I’d pass them along to someone else to enjoy.
There aren’t a whole lot of them. I have Oct 2011-Feb 2012 and April-May 2012. Would prefer to hand them off to someone local, but I’d also consider shipping them.
At long last I’ve finally gotten around to putting the coax and interface cord on the Softrock Lite II receiver. The cord to plug into the sound card came from some old discarded speakers, and the coax is a short length of RG58 with an SMA connector that I picked up a while ago. I was originally going to use it for an antenna project for the VX8-DR, but figured I could always get another one later.
Now I just need to find some time to get it on the air. If I want to use the antenna, I’ll have to find an SMA (female) to SO-239 adapter, or make some jumper wires to connect the ends.