Frog Fun

Remember our "new" long body Samurai that we bought in December? (check the archives) Well, we haven't driven it much, 'cause there were stripped and missing studs in the axles, non-functioning brake parts and other odds and ends that tended to make it "Unsafe at Any Speed", to quote someone from the '60s who still seems to be popular on the college lecture circuit.

I got "new" brake drums, and rotors on eBay and a friend brought down a lot of new OEM small parts like seals, studs, and nuts. It took a few days to take things apart without destroying anything but I've got the back end all rebuilt, except for the brake shoes, which are shipping from the States next week.

I've done one side of the front end and will attack the second side this weekend. There was all sorts of gunk and grit inside the steering knuckle, and a bad kingpin bearing. I was able to get a replacement bearing here on Bonaire! And I replaced all the seals and gaskets just in case. My resurfaced eBay brake disks and some new pads from the Suzuki dealer here should help with the stopping performance, which had been even more leisurely than the acceleration provided by the mighty 970cc engine.

Here is a photo of the front end all torn down. Notice the dead washing machine in the background that Udo is fixing. That funny thing on the axel is a birfield joint. It is sort of a poor man's CV joint. Here are the parts I took off and cleaned up. They represent hours of work with degreaser, wire wheels and wire brushes. Countless cleaning rags have also given their all during the course of this project. Udo happened to have a second dead washing machine hanging out in the shop, which I pressed into service as a handy dandy work stand.

Air Conditioning progress

Udo has been busy out in the air-co pit. This is definitely a nice time to be working outdoors on Bonaire. It's very warm, but not deathly hot like July to the end of November.
Here we see that Udo has insulated the piping running to and from the chiller barrel. Yesterday he painted the inside of the enclosure, Neatness counts.... even thought the whole unit will normally be closed and no one will see it.

Remember the Den Laman restaurant?

The "Den Laman" restaurant, with its dining room surrounded by giant aquariums, was a fixture on Bonaire for quite some time. But it's gone now and a new building is going up in its place. Here is how it looks from the TWR office parking lot. As I recall, it will be a mini dive resort with a number of rooms and a new restaurant.

Creole pgm. Arrives / TWR initiative in S America

The overdue Creole programs arrived late Tuesday afternoon, in time for Renata to process the first one and get it into the system for airing last night.

If you haven't checked out the official TWR web site lately, it has been redesigned and is quite interesting. I learned a lot in my brief visit this morning. Here is the latest from the web site about our ministry to Latin America. I've even cleaned up a couple typos. (and probably added some of my own!)

At present, TWR partners with 500 stations in Latin America, to which it's been broadcasting for 40 years.

With City Lights, TWR will connect mission-minded churches and individuals throughout the U.S. with Latin American churches and radio stations to resource production, distribution, airtime and follow-up in cities like Bogotà (Colombia), La Paz (Bolivia) and Sao Paulo (Brazil).

TWRÂ’s partner offices in eight Latin American countries already are producing quality original programs that will be used for this project. Broadcasts are geared to meet the needs of children, youth, women and families. TWR's Latin American partner offices also will distribute the City Lights programs to a network of affiliate stations and link the project to appropriate on-the-ground ministries or missionaries already working in a particular city.

Latin America desperately needs to hear a clear message of hope and salvation. Each year, millions of children there and in the Caribbean are mistreated, abused and exploited sexually; and 90 million live in conditions of poverty. Approximately two million adults and children are living with HIV/AIDS, and nearly 575 people in the region are infected every day (worldbank.org 2003). Churches also face pressures of disintegrating families-some countries averaging half of all marriages ending in divorce.

“Turning on the light of the Gospel in key cities no doubt will result in radicand lastinging life change for millions of Latino children, youth and adults,” says Tom Corcoran, international director for The Americas.

Program flow / great Feedback

In my last post I observed that maintaining our equipment and facilities here on Bonaire is an ongoing neverending effort.

Keeping a steady stream of programs on the air is like walking on a neverending treadmill too. As soon as Monday, the 23rd of Feb. is history, we get busy loading in the programs for Monday the 1st of March. And so it goes.

We regularly pray for our program producers, who are literally all over the world, and for the programs as the make their way here by mail, FedEx, FTP, and HTTP. We are currently waiting for some overdue programs in the Haitian Creole language. Delivery has probably been delayed by the Carnival holidays here in the Caribbean.

Living on a small island like we do, we don't often get to connect with the people who listen to our broadcasts. We know that we have listeners throughout the Caribbean and the top half of South America, but they are out of sight even though they are not out of mind. So we are really happy when we do hear a story from a listener, like we just did this past week.

We heard from Lemuel, the director of our Spanish language ministries. He reports that the pastor of a sizable church in Colombia has been listening since he was 10 years old - together with his 8 brothers. They lived in the jungles of Colombia and their father made them listen to the programs, Bible in hand and the radio on the table. Today this man is one of the leading evangelicals of Colombia. He told Lemuel, "I am grateful for the ministry of TWR. Because of the ministry from Bonaire I have become a Christian and serve the Lord today."

We'll be celebrating TWR's 40th year of broadcasting from Bonaire later this year. It is great to hear that the faithful proclamation of the Gospel has produced a lasting legacy spanning generations.

Much Maintenance

Keeping the TWR Bonaire facilities in tip top shape requires neverending maintenance. Ivan and Benny are fixing cracks in the building walls this week. I'll try to snap a photo of that one of these days. We also did some power washing of the walkways and walls and will be doing some touch up painting soon.

Cleaning the towers and tower painting looms on the horizon for later this year.

This has been a very rainy rainy season for Bonaire, so everything is as green as it gets. Rich West has been keeping the weeds at bay around the Office and the Activities Building. We've found that if you cut the weeds often, they end up looking somewhat like a lawn.
Here is another shot of Rich in action that looks a little more like Bonaire. The stink pond is in the background and cactus can be seen beyond that.

As an added Bonaire treat, we've noticed flamingoes in the stink pond lately.

Airco Update

We are back on line this weekend after not having our internet connection at home all week.
I'm feeling stronger following my bout with the flu. Did some hoeing of weeds in the yard on Friday and Saturday. Even went for an easy bike ride on Saturday.

The guys have gotten the second half of the airconditioning system running. I heard it was cooling the water like crazy. I guess that is a good thing. Here is a picture of the chiller barrel with all the piping and sensors installed.

It kind of looks like a high tech "still" to me, heh-heh. Actually we did used to have a still out at the transmitter site back in the day. We used it to make super pure water for the vapor phase cooling system in two of the transmitters.

More pictures will probably be forthcoming after the pipes are insulated and cleaned up.

Flu bug

Well, I'm back in the land of the living after being in bed with the flu for a week. Yuck.
It is definitely better to be sick in bed in cool breezy Feb. than in the muggy fall months. I read just about all of our collection of Dick Francis books last week.

While I was home, the guys continued working on the airconditioning project. Here is a picture of the chiller barrel with water and Freon pipes added. The water pipes are the big plastic ones.

Airco Project Update

Now that the standby generator is in and the new internet connections seems to be working well, work continues on the second half of the studio airconditioning plant rebuild and the storage container move. I don't think I've mentioned the containers before so stay tuned for more on that one.

The airco compressors and controls are located in the airco room. Outside, just on the other side of the wall is the airco pit, where the chiller barrels and condenser coils are located.

We've stripped out the guts of the old condenser unit and are using it as an enclosure for the new chiller barrels. The new condenser unit is elevated above the old unit. This makes for pretty easy access for all the components and fittings.

Here is a photo in the compressor room showing a compressor, some of the control wiring, and looking out through a hole in the wall towards the airco pit.

Here is a photo of the new chiller barrel, sitting in the old condenser housing and looking back towards the hole in the wall and the airco room.

New Internet Connection is Operational

Yesterday, with the help of Steve Shantz our TWR Linux guru (who is in Austria these days) we reprogrammed our firewall and set the office LAN to access the Internet over our new Telbo 128k wireless modem. After a day and a half of use, it seems to be working great.

The best part is that it could cost us as little as one tenth as much per month as our old dedicated line and 64k Internet connection.

New Generator is online

The new standby generator is fully operational. The tech. wizard from the dealer in Curacao came over to Bonaire today and checked out our installation, performed the initial start up, and did the proof of performance tests.

The genset runs great and works perfectly. They ran it at normal load, full load, and overload; and it pulled like a champ.

The best news is that our UPS systems are "happy" with the quality of the power output of this genset. There was no way to be absolutely sure of this until we actually ran the unit. But after powering our critical systems for a while during the gemerator setup process, the UPSs switched off line and began recharging their batteries once the generator started supplying power.

I added a few final photos of the inside of the ATS, as well as a couple of the genset with it's covers off while it was being set up and tested. My usual comments about clicking on the pictures to see larger versions apply here.

This may be the final entry in the standby generator story, Praise the Lord.

Awana Grand Prix Action

It's Grand Prix season again. The kids love working on their little wooden cars. We had our first workshop day yesterday morning from 9 am to 11 am. It's great to interact with the kids in a different setting than the usual Awana club meeting format.

Once the kids figure out what the want for a design, they draw it out on the wood block and mark the areas that need to be cut away. Then some of the leaders do the cutting with power tools, and it's back to the kids to do the sanding and finishing. Once the cars are finished, the leaders help add lead weights to bring the cars up the 5 oz weight limit.

I've posted some pictures on our club photo site.

New Internet Access - Hooray

After about 6 months on a waiting list, we now have Internet access at home here on Bonaire. Waiting turned out to be ok because the provider has had to get numerous bugs out of their systems. We have a cable modem, always on, type connection. Unlike cable modems in the States that can sometimes reach high speeds, ours is limited to 128K, but we are glad to be connected.

We have had the same cable modem from Flamingo TV at the TWR office since last summer. It is set to provide up to 256K. We use it to download radio programs from our TWR offices and cooperating broadcasters. The ones on ftp sites are easiest to download, but we get them from http sites too. Downloading a half hour program can take as little as 16 minutes with the cable modem. It used to take at least an hour and a half with the leased line 64K connection at the office. By way of comparison, I downloaded a half hour Insight For Living program with my Dad's DSL connection in PA in about 6 minutes, and I think it takes about 3 minutes with the T1 connection at the TWR headquarters in Cary.

So we are not on the cutting edge, here on Bonaire, but we've come a long way.

Yesterday, we also got a wireless modem connection from Telbo installed at the office. It is a 128K connection, and gives us two independent paths to the internet. The good thing about this Telbo connection is that, unlike the FTV service, all the "ports" are working. FTV is trying to get the ports unblocked, but right now we can't set up a IPSEC tunnel on port 500, do Instant Messaging, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

If we can set up a secure tunnel to our TWR headquarters in Cary using the wireless modem, then we can drop our super expensive leased line internet connection. We get our email here on Bonaire from an Exchange server at the Cary office and our Accountant here on Bonaire does all of his financial work on a Citrix server in the Cary office. So when we type in stuff on our computers here on Bonaire, we are really working on computers up in North Carolina. It's pretty cool, but can be painfully slow at times on our 64K line. We are hoping to speed that up with these new internet connections.

Standby Generator Update

This morning, Rich and Udo moved the new standby generator over to roughly where it will be installed. That probably took some doing since it weighs over 1100 lbs. I often use an old skateboard to move heavy stuff around at home, including VW engines back in my dune buggy days. Something tells me that wouldn't have worked here. :)

We shut down the power to the building at noon and they did some prep work on the wiring, to get ready for installing the ATS (automatic transfer switch) and the new genset. It was a good opportunity to verfiy that our two UPS units were working ok to keep us on the air. I'm happy to report that the UPSes did fine.

Pictures of the whole standby generator project are here. You can click on the thumbnails to see bigger pictures and click on the bigger pictures to see even bigger pictures. (800x600)

New Generator Arrives

The new standby generator was delivered on Monday afternoon. It was well packaged and looks to be in good shape. The guys are figuring out exactly where to locate it in the shop, planning the wiring runs, mounting the automatic transfer switch etc.

By Friday, we plan to have it all set up and the control wiring and the power cables run. An engineer will be over from Curacao to check everything out and do the initial startup and various proof of performance tests.

airco project update

The guys have started on the second half of the studio/office air-conditioning plant rebuild. The first step is to dismantle the old equipment. Here is the old chiller barrel and here is an old condenser coil assembly.

This is a cold water system. The airco plant is in an annex and makes cold water. The cold water is piped to the studio and office buildings and is used to cool them. It is sort of like the hot water heating system my parents' house in NJ had, except that is uses cold water to cool the rooms instead of hot water to heat them. The airco plant that we are rebuilding would be like the furnace and hot water tank in my parents' house. We basically are replacing the furnace part of the system. The local radiators in the studios and offices are still ok.

We don't really use radiators, of course. Some of the offices have what are called fan-coil units. The studios use a big centralized forced air system. There is a big heat exchanger and blower in the cleverly named "blower room" that sends cold air to all the studios through a big duct works. If the ducts are designed and sized well, cold air enters the studios, but noise doesn't. This is a good thing when one is using the rooms to record audio.

The airco plant that we are rebuilding has compressors to compress the Freon, and condenser coils and evaporator valves to cool it off. There are also lots of control circuits and pipes and valves etc. The cold Freon then goes through the chiller barrels. The water in the system goes through the chiller barrels too, by means of different pipes. The cold Freon in the chiller barrels cools the water, and the water then cools the buildings.

We basically have a mirror image pair of compressors, chiller barrels, and condensers. Either of them can handle our heat load. That way we still have cooling if one of the systems needs maintenance or repairs. The first system was rebuilt last fall. Now the guys are doing the second half of the plant.

Washington Park Adventure

Having successfully found Freddie Flamingo, we decided on Saturday to enter the wilds of the Washington-Slacbai National Park and look for Barry Barracuda.

The dirt roads in the park have deteriorated during the rainy season and some of the hills were honest to goodness four wheel drive territory. Even going up in first gear, Richard had to hang onto Nancy so she wouldn't bounce right out of the car.

We checked out the snorkeling at Barcadera, but the waves were too big at the entry point. Playa Benge was ok and we saw lots of neat stuff out on the tongue and groove coral formations. Benge is cool because snorkelers can see types of coral that normally live in deeper water because of the way the coral ridges come up close to the surface. Here is a photo of Richard and Nancy in action.

We also stopped at Wajaka II, where there is a little beachlet and lots of calm shallow water to mosey around in. It's a great spot for beginning snorkelers. This is where we finally caught up with Barry Barracuda. He was about 3 to 3 and a half feet long and starting to get chunky. Unfortunately, the water was a little too murky for pictures, tho we tried. Barry was quite content to just hang there in the water posing for us. We also saw a couple flounders doing their blend in with the sand thing.

The buildings at Slac Bai looked great. They have been repaired after being heavily damaged by the swells from hurricane Lenny a few years ago. I think the official re-opening will be coming up soon.

We double checked at the gate and one can now tour the park by bicycle, without a lot of extra red tape. Previously one had to be in a group with a chase vehicle, spare wheels, etc. I'm planning to add some trips to the park to my Saturday morning long bike ride schedule.

Happy New Year

New Years Eve was great. We drugged the dogs and put them in one of the double insulated soundproof studios from 10pm to 1am. So they were blissfully unaware of the mayhem taking place all over Bonaire as the new year approached.

We shot off our meager supply of roman candles, sky rockets, and Sandra's favorites; cardboard tanks and chickens. The chickens were particularly lame this year, but Sandra still had fun burning them up with the mighty firepower of the tanks.

On Saturday, we all piled into the trusty Samurai and set off in search of Freddie Flamingo. Flamingos are notoriously shy creatures and start to move away as soon as they see you. Here is a shot of Richard and Nancy deep in the wilds of Bonaire.

Here are some of Freddies friends, and lo and behold, Freddie put in a special appearance right by the road at Goto Lake.

We then continued on to Ricon, where it really does seem that Priscas ice cream stand is no more. We settled for stewed chicken and goat from some roadside stands, with side dishes of rice, funchi, and tutu. Yum.

Family Fun on Bonaire

Our son, Richard, and his girlfriend, Nancy, are here for a couple weeks. I'm taking a few days off from work and we're hanging out and having fun.

I'm working on the new green Suzuki too, so it will be ready for action once we register it next week. You haven't lived until you have taken tubeless tires off their rims with a couple big screwdrivers and a sledge hammer. I've wire brushed the rims to get the rust off, and painted them. Now I'm trekking all over the island to see if I can find a couple of the right size tires. So far, no good.

We went fireworks shopping this morning. New years eve is a big fireworks time and this fireworks deprived New Jersey boy really gets into it. Here are some photos of the plus or minus 15 minute long string of firecrackers that two local businesses set off in front of the Napa store last year last year. We'll be there again this year. I may bring a sound leval meter this time instead of a camera.

Merry Christmas from Bonaire

It's 8 am Christmas day and here I am at my desk in the office. What is wrong with this picture!
Well, I just dropped in to change the backup tape in our computer server room. Each tape holds 100 gigs, uncompressed, but we need two of them to back up all our audio files. So we got half last night and then we'll get the rest tonight. Then I can let is slide for a day or two, 'cause we won't be downloading or editing any radio programs until Monday. Boxing day is a holiday here on Bonaire. hooray!

I got outside at 6 today, to let one of the dogs answer the call of nature. The stars were great, with Scorpius coming up in the south east, the southern cross pretty high in the south, and Jupiter right overhead.

Since I was up, I decided what the heck, and fired up my trusty Cateye lights and took off around the north end on my bike. So now I can be a Christmas couch potatoe with a clear conscience.

Then showered and stopped at Buddies grocery and picked up a can of peanuts so we'd have something to munch on while watching those Christmas specials on TV. (we are christmas cookie impared)

It really great having the transmitters and studio operations computerized and automated these days. We all always had to work extra on Christmas to air the special programming. Now we can set it up ahead of time and hang out at home with our families. Here is a picture of what the program log for part of Christmas eve looks like, and here is one of Maggie setting up the log that is airing right now on Christmas day.

First we load the programs into the computer and edit them. Then we tell the computer where to find them to play them on the air, and voila, we're good to go.