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Holes 4 Heroes, Feb. 1, 2020

Fishing For Life serves youth, families, veterans, and communities through fishing and outdoor programs. Holes 4 Heroes is an ice-fishing festival tailored for armed forces families, and Holes 4 Heroes 2020 is now in the history books. As always, it’s the coolest program in the United States.

Thanks again to Nextera Telecom for the 20 mbit wireless internet connection on top of frozen Medicine Lake in Plymouth, MN. this year. Also thanks to WWTC – AM1280 The Patriot, and BOB 106.3 FM for broadcasting from on top of the ice. Holes 4 Heroes 2020 is in the history books. Enjoy the video highlights and still pictures below.

Here is a link to my Youtube Holes 4 Heroes 2020 playlist with all the videos below, plus a few more.

The WiFi died a few minutes before this ended. Later, I saw the power cable for my WiFi access point was loose; somebody must have bumped it.

Here is a quick peak at some of the behind-the-scenes tech stuff getting ready for Holes 4 Heroes 2020. The old firewall died and I had to build a new one this year. I live streamed this video earlier in the week after I built the new one.

I messed up our home WiFi testing the H4H Wifi. It was the first of a few self-induced glitches this year. Friday afternoon on the ice, I made a rookie mistake and could not figure out why my new firewall refused to route. I stared at three, count ’em, three default gateway routes for almost an hour before the lightbulb went off in my head – with plenty of help from a few of my Red Hat coworkers on the phone. Multiple default gateways is nonsense; always has been, always will be. I must be getting rusty–or senile–for not seeing that problem right away.

For anyone interested in tech details, here is a link to the bug I filed with Red Hat about that setting.

And then Saturday morning, I connected the network cables backwards, and it took me almost 1/2 hour and a tech support call to figure it out after I couldn’t ping the next-hop upstream router. Turned out, that router doesn’t answer pings and I should have just pinged the Google DNS server at 8.8.8.8.

Still pictures

Steve with AM1280 The Patriot and Jeff with Bob 106.3 FM
The Holes 4 Heroes 2020 nerve center.
Tip-up demo
Miss Minnesota first runner-up on the radio, a few minutes after she nailed the National Anthem
People fishing. Because that’s what people do at an ice-fishing festival.
Tackle Terry Tuma on the radio
Mentor and mentee with Mitch Berg and Brad Carlson
A selfie of me on the radio. Sheesh, I look like a helicopter pilot in this picture. But as everyone who read “Virus Bomb” knows, I’ve never been in an aircraft cockpit.
As the sun slowly sets in the west… teardown. It was a good day.

Holes 4 Heroes 2021

Holes 4 Heroes 2019