QST de N7GMT

Two notable happenings, in my hammy world:

KB7QJC finally upgraded to a General Class license. His boys — and the rest of us, for that matter — have been after him for a rather long time, but the Morse code requirement was something he didn’t care to have to deal with. Now that it’s out of the way, he has upgraded. HF privileges! Wah-HOO!

The other gent who has earned my congratulations is currently KE7OVY, but will soon likely be K7BAN; he is the father of my buddy KE7JSM … who is also planning on changing his callsign, and has requested N7BAN. (Isn’t that cute? Father and son with matching callsigns. ) The thing that makes this so cool for me, is that ‘OVY — an old military radio copyist(?) — can copy CW like nobody’s business, even after … well, “many, many” years of letting his skills languish on the shelf. He unconsciously infected ‘JSM at an early age with a desire to get into radio, and now his son and I are feeding off each other’s enthusiasm. Besides, it’s neat to see someone else join the hobby, ’cause I know how much fun it can be.

So a hearty congratulations, guys!

(And ‘OVY-cum-’BAN-sr., we expect you to be upgrading to at least General soon, too; you already have the code down pat, and will have so much fun bumming around the world wirelessly!)

Before you get your twisted hopes up, I was recently introduced to a wicked cool screen saver. Those familiar with classic science fiction will recognize the reference to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, from which the movie Blade Runner was made.

A bunch of folks wondered what computers do while they’re waiting for us to tell them to do something. Really; your computer, right now, is incredibly bored and just idling away the microseconds. (If you’re running Windows, it is listed as “System Idle Process” in the task manager; usually it’s running 95% of the time. Go ahead and look to see if your computer isn’t bored.)

So. Bored computers. Inquisitive programmers … programmers who have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and seen Blade Runner a few too many times. (more…)

<singing (poorly)> “And we’ll have fun, fun, fun, till daddy takes the paddles awaaay …”

KE7JSM called me up tonight and wanted to know if I was up for a little code practice. “Sure,” says I and we toodled off to 144.080 MHz, our usual local-CW watering hole.

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Well, we atoned for our day out, Friday; we schlepped the kids up to Swiss Days, and convinced my sister-in-law and her husband that they, too, wanted to experience Swiss Days. With a herd of kids.

I got to get my leather-bound book; we got to eat more <ahem> “Swiss” food; and the kids got to spend their September allowance on bags of marbles at the hand-made games booth (I don’t think any of them had the cash in their hands longer than twenty seconds, some literally two seconds—from my hand to theirs, to the booth-keeper’s). No one died; there were no kids lost in the making of the expedition (although two crashed and fell asleep towards the end); and some of the kids learned to bus surf on the way back to the parking lot.

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