BillCat's Wak

Why billcat?

Hobbies:

    Climbing

            I used to climb wayyy back in college but I stopped shortly after I got married. 92/93 pics. Thanksgiving 2000 climbing pics. In 2004 I started again. Climbing at BigRock. Climbing at Joshua Tree. Climbing at BigRock2.

    WaveLan

            We're working on creating a wireless network using off the shelf equipment. Here is more info on that project.

    Snowboarding

            Snowboarding seems like as good a way as any to kill yerself. Here are pix from our Feb 2003 trip.

    Golf

            Somehow I managed to get into golf. I dono how this happened. I think it's Milo's fault. In any case it's happened and I've got the bug. Here are some great golf courses in my area. An executive course I like is located here. Sooner or later I'm going to have to take some lessons so I can stop sucking.. :)

    Jeeping

            My wife and I own(ed) a CJ-7 jeep and we take it out to the Anza Borrego offroad park often. Canyon. PismoBeach. Anza Borrego Offroad Park. Borrego 2. Off Road with Buster. Thanksgiving Jeeping. March 2003 Borrego run New Jeep in borrego with weaver and crew. Aug pismo trip here Borrego 2005 here June 2007 Yankee Hill here Sept 2007 Saxon Mtn here Sept 2007 Reading's Ranch here March 2008 Snow Jeeping here May 2008 Reading's Ranch here July 2008 Dakan Road here August 2008 Yankee Hill here

    Geocaching

            I've always been interested in owning a GPS unit and after finding out about geocaching on cnn.com one day I knew I had to own one. Check out the geocaching site. It's a great excuse for a hike and it's all about knowing exactly where you are. On our first geocaching trip we found two caches in one day. Here are pictures of that trip. Here are pix of our trip to borrego to find a cache there. There are some pix of our latest trip here. We placed our own cache in Tecolote canyon. Here are pix from that trip. We went to see my parents in Colorado and found a cache there. Here are pix from that trip.

    Model Rocketry

            I never had rockets as a kid so when I turned 24 I decided I wanted to see what I'd missed. I've since built several of the off the shelf Estes type kits as well as built several homebrew high power clustered type rockets. Here are some pix of the buildup of my first cluster rocket.

    Lan Parties

            Lan parties are a blast. It's a great excuse to get out of the house for 24 hours and play some online games with no lag at all. It's also a great time to swap software and collect MP3s. Here are pictures of the first lan party we had at our new house. Also there are new pix up from LanDiegoX here

       Retro Arcade

            I've always been into old school video games. M.U.L.E is my all time favorite. After finding plans to build a Defender style arcade cabinet on the internet I decided I just must have one. I purchased some controls from ebay and found a great interface to the keyboard. You can see pictures of the cabinet buildup here.

        HomeBrew

            While I don't drink lots of beer I got into homebrew after I was given a homebrew kit as a present. It's quite fun to make up a batch of something and then get sloshed on the results. Several batches of 'Billcat's Bitter Brew' have resulted since and I'm always quite surprised at how drinkable the stuff is even after what we do to it.

       Paintball

           Back in the late 80s I started playing paintball. It wasn't the sport it is today. Co2 capsules and pump guns were the rule of the day and a case would last 6 of us at least a month. The largest hoppers we had on any gun held 45 rounds and we were lucky if the gun had a fast "auto" pump. Today, due to semi auto play, some players are "one case == one kill" and the guns fire so rapidly that the strategy of the game has changed. Wanting to get back into paintball but unwilling to give up the old way of play I decided to purchase enough old style paint guns so I could host my own games. As long as I was going to go old school I decided to go with one of the classic guns. The Benjamin Seridan PGP. This gun was a bit old even back when I was starting out, so getting these would mean restoring old pieces of history to working order. Thanks to ebay, I now own five of these. Here are pictures of the collection. Here are pix of our first stock game out at Rex's new field. Here are pix of the first semi-auto game at Rex's place.

      Amateur Radio

           I picked up my radio license KG6KVI(now KR0VER) after gettinginterested in doing long distance Wavelan 802.11 work. Currently I'm active as part of the kg6one rover team and we're trying to compete in all ARRL VHF+ contests.

kr0ver/r rover info
kg6one/ac0gi/w6xm rover info

Current server:

05/31/2023