The Miracle of Birth: The Untold Story

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It was August 1981. I was 18, and about to start my freshman year of college. I was young, I was nervous, and I was driving my mother to an OB/GYN appointment. There was some concern that she was experiencing a somewhat early menopause, or perhaps had a tumor or cyst that needed to be addressed.

The true joy of that day was sitting in the waiting room with the expectant mothers (and a few steely-eyed but non-expectant mothers there with their entirely too-expectant daughters). I’ve always looked younger than I am. In my 50s, I appreciate that more than I did then — I didn’t look a day over 15 at most, and this earned me some hard looks, disapproving scowls, and a furtively whispered conversation.

So when my mother emerged from the mysterious confines of the exam room, I made of point of saying, “Ready to go, Mom?” earning me some nervous and sheepish expressions (and one hard look from someone who apparently thought it was my fault anyway. You pervert).

My mother didn’t say much, and we got in the car and began the 30-minute drive home. Mom rode in ominous silence — she’s normally a gregarious chatterbox, and being about as nervous about college as I was, certainly had things to say.

But she didn’t, and it dawned on me why. As we pulled into the driveway, I said, “Please don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”

“Okay,” she replied.

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, in exchange for chauffeur services, you have to tell me the day you will tell Dad so I CAN WORK LATE AND NOT GET KILLED FOR KNOWING BEFORE HE DID.”

“Okay.”

And life went on for a few days. My schedule and Dad’s didn’t overlap much, so I managed to not have to look him in the eye. But later (I think on a Saturday…can’t remember, but that’s the only day where he and I would have been home at dinnertime together), I walked in on the rest of the family having a meal…in deathly silence. My brother and sister were focused on their food. My mother kept rearranging her plate. And my father sat there with a fork in one hand, a steak knife (off which I never took my eyes) in the other, and a complete, uneaten meal in front of him.

“Oh. You told him,” I said.

“Uhhhnnnn…” said Dad.

“Well….”

“Uhhhhnnnn….” said Dad.

“I’ll just go sit in the trailer and listen to the shortwave.”

“Wait…YOU KNEW ABOUT THIS?”

Exit, stage left, pursued by a bear.

That was slight hyperbole…there was no pursuit, nor a bear. The evening was actually fairly tame as Dad stewed and Mom fretted. It was the NEXT day when Dad let loose with one of his classic rants. THE BOY IS STARTING COLLEGE! WE DON’T HAVE MONEY! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? (I don’t even want to speculate here.) WHEN ARE YOU DUE? MID-NOVEMBER?! YOU’RE 7 MONTHS ALONG?!!?????!?!??!??111??!?!!?!ELEVEN?? HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW?

I suddenly stopped being all that nervous about college. In fact, it was a very busy time, and I was able to ignore the entire situation without guilt. Certainly without worry, because I knew that Dad would be fine the moment he set eyes on his newborn child.

And he was fine, and proud of how my kid brother turned out. As are we all, I think.

Happy birthday, Boo!

We have changed website hosts

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Folks, we’ve moved the entire site to a new hosting service. We had some trouble with the old one (including what appears to be a hacking attempt and some lost files), so we’re going with someone better. The move should be seamless. But if you notice anything wrong with the site, please let us know. (Note that it might take a day or two for the new email addresses to push through.)

Telling Lies for Fun and Profit

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My brother has a degree in history, and an interest in “alternate history,” where you ask “what if thus-and-such had turned out differently” and go from there. “What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War?” is a popular one.

My brother has a different approach — he’s created an entire war with Canada. And boy, he’s good at it. He tells the tales so convincingly that a reference librarian took three hours to catch on to the gag. And I am not sure the teachers at the school where he used to work ever caught on.

Short version is that if your story is reasonably consistent and you can keep a straight face, you can pretty much say anything you want and someone will believe it. Every time.

I’ve long felt this is giggle-worthy. I still do. And let’s face it, a number of people (such as S. M. Stirling) make a living telling such lies for profit — alternate history books are reasonably popular. They’re usually in the science fiction section of your local bookstore, and occasionally in the romance section. Check them out.

But lately, I’m harboring doubts. We have a non-trivial number of Senators and Representatives in the US who spout a lot of this nonsense. Many do so because they know better, but they need the votes. But an increasing number do this because THEY BELIEVE IT. Items from satirical or parodic sites such as The Onion are regularly quoted by our leaders and our news media as being true. And our leaders sometimes set policy or pass legislation based on this!

I can’t tell if it’s because we’ve become more gullible, or because the gullible now vote in more elections. But either way, I think it’s crucial that we teach critical thinking skills to our children. (Some of the aforementioned leaders are quite against this. They feel it challenges their faith. Well, yes. Duh. EVERYTHING should be challenged, including stuff I believe.) We’re becoming a nation of people who lack the skills to know when we’re being conned, and it won’t end well.

Can’t help but think this is partly how we’ve come to our current situation.

Ham Radio Encryption

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Recently, someone filed a notice of proposed rule making with the FCC regarding encryption of ham radio transmissions. For those non-hams out there, encryption is strictly forbidden under FCC Part 97 (which governs amateur radio in the USA). No amateur radio transmission can be encoded or encrypted in any way that is intended to obfuscate or hide the content of the transmission. The notice has generated some debate in the community.

The basis of the idea is that HIPAA laws are very strict regarding identifiable medical information. I’ve been a volunteer with a number of medical teams (including for my employer), and personally identifiable medical information MUST be kept confidential (with some exceptions, some covered below). The individual who filed felt that the open nature of ham radio would thus render it less useful to served agencies during emergencies, and allowing encryption would allay that concern.

I’m firmly against this idea, however, for the following reasons:

  1. HIPAA simply does not apply to amateur radio traffic. Hospitals, physicians, nurses, insurance companies…these all have obligations under HIPAA. A ham operator passing traffic does not — the responsibility lies with the originator. In fact, this is an already-solved problem for them, as encrypted radio is not ubiquitous in the public sector. They’d apply the same techniques with amateur radio.
  2. HIPAA does have exceptions, which include provisions for disaster scenarios. The point of HIPAA is to curtail the misuse of information, not to hobble emergency efforts.
  3. Encryption of transmissions, even for good reasons, would utterly eliminate the ability to determine if the transmission was legal. Part 97 strictly forbids the use of amateur radio for any pecuniary reason. This is diligently enforced, both by the FCC and by hams themselves. With encryption, we’d never know, and the amateur radio service would doubtless be misused.
  4. I did some research, and I found no mention of situations where the filer’s concerns had actually come to pass. The ARRL agrees with this — it’s just never happened (in no small part due to points 1 and 2). This doesn’t guarantee that it won’t in the future, but it seems unlikely.

This seems like a solution in search of a problem.

 

 

The Art of the Wedding

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When I’m not busy biking, coding, or radiating RF directly into the neighbor’s very annoying dog (NOTE: I DO NOT ACTUALLY DO THIS, even though the howling bastard deserves it), I play music. I play with upwards of five different bands in a year, on several instruments, and in a wide variety of styles. Needless to say, I’ve been around a bit, and yes…I have a day job. Every professional musician I personally know does. That’s how it goes.

Some of the best gigs I’ve ever played have been weddings. I usually played with a group dedicated to that purpose — weddings and private parties. I’m 50, and I was pretty much the youngest most gigs. We had all gotten out of the bar scene due to the enormous amount of time it takes to spend the night sucking up second-hand smoke. Of course, Iowa no longer allows smoking in bars, so I’m willing to revisit the idea, but it’s still a lot of work. Musicians don’t get a lot of credit for the effort required.

Over the years of playing weddings ranging from “royal family” to “low budget, high mileage,” I have learned that weddings simply are not like other gigs. (This is true of private parties in general, but with weddings, you don’t get the leeway you get with other events.) It’s always good to be aware of your venue and your audience, but especially so for post-nuptial parties. If you’re considering booking a wedding, consider the following.

  1. The band is a bridal accessory. Absolutely nobody present is there to hear you. Period. They are not your fans…they are there for the happy couple. If you act as if things are any other way, you may not get any more wedding gigs as word spreads. And it will.
  2. A corollary to 1: get a grip on your volume. “If it’s too loud, you’re too old!” won’t cut it. You’re going to have people there ranging from 90 days to 90 years old who showed up to see “the kids” off on their new adventure. They’ll want to visit, talk, eat, and have a good time. If you’re interfering with any of that…you’re in trouble. This isn’t easy…you need to be “loud and proud” for the dancers, but basically background for everyone else.
  3. Bands hate this, but at most weddings, you’re pretty much a living jukebox. You’ll get requests. You won’t know all of them, but you’d best be prepared to play some of them. Doing so goes a LONG way toward making them happy enough to recommend you to friends.
  4. The band is a bridal accessory. You are on THEIR schedule, not yours, and certainly not the one they provided you before the gig. I have yet to play a wedding where everything happened as scheduled. (One came close — marriage of a Jewish woman to an Asian man. Most delightfully fun mix of cultures I’ve ever seen. Everyone had a blast.) Be flexible…you won’t start on time, and there will likely be some adjustments as you go. I do recommend that you hold pretty close to your scheduled stopping time. There’s a tendency for everyone to want to keep celebrating…that’s a good sign, in fact. But you can’t let them make you go much over. In fact, the venue staff will doubtless appreciate things ending on time, and probably also the bride and groom — they’ve had a busy day!
  5. Be on your best behavior when not on stage. No foul language, no commentary on the girl in the very short blue dress (she is at EVERY wedding. Not kidding), no smoking where they can see you (find where the venue staff take smoke breaks, go there). And I shouldn’t have to say this… but NO DRUGS. Personally, I don’t even drink alcohol when working. One drink isn’t a problem, but if something goes wrong, I don’t want that idea to even be in play.
  6. The band is a bridal accessory…and so it the groom. Sorry, man.

Have fun!

 

A bit more on APRS and bicycles

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My bike rig is a Kenwood TH72, which has APRS built-in. It’s essentially the handheld equivalent of the D710, which is a fine radio. Like the D710, it allows you to tweak the SmartBeaconing[r] settings. I spent a fair amount of time meddling with them, and learned two key lessons:

  1. There is absolutely no need to change the “corner pegging” settings. At all. The defaults work just as well for bikes as they do for cars.
  2. There is very little need to change the speed-based beaconing, but it sometimes helps.

The speed-based settings depend quite a bit on how you ride. When I’m on the road, I’m moving anywhere from 10 to 24 mph, depending on conditions. That’s fast enough to get inside the beaconing envelope, which by default bottoms out at 5 mph. With the default settings and the frequency of the turns on my usual routes, the default settings work.

If, however, you are a more casual biker, you might want to drop the bottom of the envelope from 5 mph to 2 mph. Below this, you beacon no more often than every 30 minutes, which might not be what you want for some situations. I’d leave the top end alone,  but I’ve had it set as low as 30 mph without issues. (Again, this setting was probably buried by the corner pegging.)

Of course, this is all for general use. See the previous post for what to do for events.

 

Working Events from a Bicycle

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Ham operators in my area work a lot of drills and events over the course of a year. (We have well over 1000 hours in on events, and that does NOT include Field Day.) We conduct a “hot wash” after every event to see if we can improve on anything. Remember, just noting what went wrong isn’t a “lesson learned,” it’s a “lesson identified.” You haven’t learned anything until you do something to fix it, and it works. You can’t do that without some sort of after-action review.

We’ve learned that bikes are very useful for the larger events. They provide more mobility than automobiles, use less fuel, and are often less intrusive and disruptive. Of course, they also take longer to get from A to B, and believe me, the weather isn’t always entirely conducive to being in the open. But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages in most cases, so we include them in our event plans.

Let’s use a recent marathon as an example. This event actually combined a 13.1 and 26.2, and it was a qualifying event for the Boston marathon, so we had thousands of runners and supporters on site. It was less than a week after the bombing at the Boston run, so things were a little more tense than usual. There was a lot of focus on situational awareness — knowing where the walkers and runners were at any given moment.

Tracking the lead runners is actually not hard. There is normally a lead vehicle (truck or car, I’m not sure something like a Gator will keep up). Because the lead runners for both the half and full runs are pretty fast, that works well. Unfortunately, that’s less true for the other end. The trailing walkers/runners are a lot slower and stop more often. We decided to have two bikes equipped with APRS gear at the end of each of the runs to track the trailing edge. Bikes seemed the best choice for several reasons. First, we have a few local hams who are dedicated bikers who have reliable installations on their rides. Second, a reasonably skilled biker can ride VERY slowly — I can drop under 2 mph on my mountain bike without a second thought, and the other bike was a tricycle recumbent (the fabled Wheeled Barcalounger). Third, they are allowed on sidewalks and walking trails, which turned out to be important for this particular event.

APRS coverage was provided by a local digipeater set to the event frequency — we didn’t want to use the standard frequency due to the high number of packets sent during the day. The local digi also gated the packets to the APRS-IS backbone so that it was available to race officials and public service by smart phone. In addition, we used HSMM-MESH(R) to make sure that a dedicated display was available in the EMA mobile command post. NCS had a digital position that made sure that all water stops and other labelled points were beaconed as objects regularly.

The tricky part was getting the bike rigs set up. Signals were chiefly good, even with just a rubber duck — but only if the radio was NOT right next to the rider’s body! But we did have trouble with some of the more subtle settings, which caused some problems for NCS. The digi was able to receive all packets, so race officials didn’t share this problem. (That was rather serendipitous.)

Here are my recommendations for APRS settings for these events. They apply primarily to the bikes and lead vehicle, but they will work for the more stationary operators as well.

  • Turn SmartBeaconing (R) (or GeniusBeaconing (R), whatever you’re using) OFF. You’ll actually want to ping at a regular rate. This is especially true for the chase bikes. SmartBeaconing bases its ping times primarily on speed and “corner pegging.” GeniusBeaconing seems to work mostly from position error. In both cases, your chase bikes are going too slowly for this to provide any reasonable update rate. Even if you change the algorithm parameters, you’re not going to get a good result. Two to five minutes between pings works very well. We used three minutes at one event.
  • You must turn off both proportional pathing and the decay algorithm, if any. Both were created to reduce traffic in crowded areas, back before we had sophisticated algorithms. Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what you want at these events! Proportional pathing actually changes the path setting between pings. So if you are set to WIDE2-1, you’ll get a ping for WIDE2-1, then one for RFONLY, then a WIDE1-1, then RFONLY…then the cycle repeats. Our problem was that NCS wasn’t getting all the RFONLY signals. A decay algorithm actually increases the ping time if you aren’t moving…this is less critical, but turn it off anyway.
  • If your infrastructure supports it, move large events to an alternate frequency. We used 144.990 (+600 kHz from the national standard). This will keep non-event pings off everyone’s displays, and doesn’t flood non-participants with irrelevant packets.

Here are some other considerations:

  • WEAR A BLOODY HELMET. Seriously, there is no excuse for not having one. I know a lot of people consider them too restricting, or too hot, or even too “not cool, man.” I’ve even heard one addle-pated twit suggest that they make bikers less safe. Trust me, they work, and you’re not likely to find circumstances at these events where they won’t.
  • I highly suggest a mirror. You’ll hear apocryphal stories about how mirrors are dangerous because shards might fly into your eye or pierce your brain or vote Communist…ignore them. I couldn’t find a single, documented case of a small mirror being a problem that didn’t involve someone mounting it particularly stupidly. You can live without one, but it sure helps.
  • Dress in layers. The first marathon event was bloody cold! It eventually warmed up, but holy carp…it was nasty. Layers will help you stay warm AND dry.
  • Bring your own water and snack bars. We’re usually nicely supported by the race staff, but we don’t depend on it.

We’ve had a lot of success with this at recent events. I encourage you to give it a try.

 

 

 

 

Ray Harryhausen 1920-2013

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I’m sad to report that special effects legend Ray Harryhausen has died at the age of 92. Many of you won’t recognize the name, but you’ve almost certainly seen his work: he did the effects animation for the 1933 classic King Kong! He also worked on a number of Sinbad movies, and animated a particularly difficult scene in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, which involved a battle between several human warriors and SEVEN animated clay skeletons.

Ray was one of those people who was both low-key and wildly influential. He was deeply passionate about his work, and he enjoyed the recognition he received, but the recognition wasn’t his motivation. He loved the fantasy genre, and really wanted to bring it to life on the screen. The net result is that he influenced more filmmakers and special effects artists than he ever would if he’d aimed to do so. Spielberg, Landis, Lucas…they were all inspired to do what they’ve done by Ray. There would likely have been no Star Wars without his influence. (There is irony there… his work in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was released the same year as Star Wars. Guess which got all the attention.)

When I was young, I was pretty much addicted to his films. Sure, the clay animation didn’t look REAL, but it was still pretty dang cool, and I appreciated the work that went into it. Check out the aforementioned Jason sometime — that entire scene was done with actors fighting nothing, then Ray laboriously animating the skeletons INTO EACH INDIVIDUAL FRAME, by hand. Like Ray, I loved the fantasy genre and wanted it brought to life. Unlike Ray, I lacked the patience and talent to work that magic.

I never developed much artistic talent, but I’ve at least learned some patience. It’s gone a long way toward building a solid amateur radio emergency response community — relationships with public service and our fellow hams take time and effort. But they are worth it in the end.

The power of public goodwill

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I fielded an interesting call today from a gentleman we’ll call JB. He called some public service folks about some interference he thought might be from ham radio, and they sent me his number.

JB is 80-ish, and seemed like a pretty cool guy. We had a great talk about his situation, which involved very odd behavior from his “touch lamps” (the ones that turn on and off when you touch them), usually in the dead of night. He thought it might be ham radio or perhaps RF from Local Big Employer (the latter being very possible, he lives right across from the plant). I realized this wasn’t likely, but I talked him through it:

  • It’s very unlikely to be RF from any source. The RF is much higher there during the day than at night, which doesn’t match the data, and it would be causing a lot of problems for his neighbors as well.
  • Those touch devices are, oddly enough, touchy. It doesn’t take much of an electrostatic change to set one off. The cheaper ones are quite sensitive to noise on the power line.
  • Those touch devices are also Part 15 devices, meaning a) they can’t cause interference, and b) there’s no legal recourse if something interferes with them.
  • He’s a block away from a 700-foot tower with Ceiling Cat-knows-what on it…much more likely to be the culprit.
  • We agree the Billboard of Death next to that tower deserves to die, even if it’s not at fault. MAN, that thing is annoying, and noisy on RF.

Short version is that I did not fix his problem, but he went away happy because we at least looked into it. The local ham community takes good operating practice seriously — if it’s us, we fix it. So we do investigate, and we try to help people understand what is going on. In short…we are helpful.

All too often, ham operators (or other volunteers, for that matter) take the “that’s not my job” approach to things. We got into ham radio because…well, we want to do radio stuff! But not every job that needs done involves radios. If you work public service or emergency events, you can be asked to do nearly anything. And you SHOULD, unless that means leaving your primary task uncovered. For example, a ham was asked to assist with setting up a small commissary at an EOC. Why? The comm room only needed one operator at the time, and they could not pull anyone else from their primary tasks…so off he went. The job was done, he got back to the radios, and the operation was not disrupted.

As public service volunteers, we don’t have the luxury of seeming unhelpful. Even just being willing to lend a hand goes a long way toward building trust and good relationships. We’re there to serve, not to be served.

 

WHOA…what happened?

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Okay, those of you NOT from Poland may be wondering what happened to all the old posts. Short answer: I reloaded WordPress!

I host with 1and1. Love them enough to keep them, but not enough to wrap them in a blankie and stuff them full of Oreos. My package with them includes the use of WordPress, but as they load it, I can’t customize things that I know I need to on my other sites. So I’ve loaded WordPress manually, and I didn’t bother to archive the older posts. There weren’t many.

So posting will continue sporadically until I get the bugs ironed out on this.