Illruminations

Here’s a peek at one of the projects on my workbench - restoring an old Midwest 5 band radio. I recently photoblogged rebuilding one of the IF transformers.

The lack of postings is due as much to my business as to any lack of interest. It was the seeing Noam Chomsky in the news (and #1 on Amazon!) that made me realize I hadn’t updated in a while. So here’s the (relatively) short verison:

We sold one house, bought another, and moved in Early July. There is still a lot of stuff to come out of storage, but that’s progressing pretty well. In the meantime I’ve done some fairly major renovations - moving an interior (load bearing) wall, installing a hardwood floor, and removing a spray-on ceiling finish. This was all to make a really tiny bedroom useable, and will be finished in the next day or two.

In the middle of this, I decided to go ahead and take my ham license exam(s). I’ve been studying off and on for these exams for over 30 years, and decided that if I didn’t move it to the top of the list it might never get there. Ham Radio licenses are granted at four levels of priviledge. The second leveI and above require passing a morse code test. I went in to the testing expecting to pass the first (Technician) test and to fail the second (morse code or Technician+). Although I had also been studying the third (General) and fourth (Extra) class material, I didn’t think I’d be able to take them. To my total surprise, I passed the morse code test. You can pass two ways - by being able to answer five questions about the simulated exchange, or by copying 1 minute (25 characters) of code without error. I passed under the latter. I went ahead and took the general exam and passed, and decided to go ahead and take the Extra exam, since I had nothing to lose. I passed it also, although not by much. So I finally knocked all that out in a single day.
It turns out that our local Boy Scout city-wide joint campout is October 21st and 22nd, the same weekend as the World Scouting Jamboree On The Air. I’ll be helping operate a station at our campout on Saturday, and at a public park on Sunday. I’m really excited about this, and will post more details when I know them. The Sunday event should be open to all scouts, including Boy Scouts, Girls Scouts, etc.

There’s a lot of other things that have been going on as well, like scouting, helping a friend open a glass bead studio, several furniture-buying trips to IKEA in Atlanta, and all the ‘normal’ stuff.

This blog had collected a lot of cruft behind the scenes and wasn’t much fun any more. I origrnally started it almost five years ago to try to present points of view that I didn’t think were getting enough public exposure. Now, thanks in part to the explosion of blogs, there’s no no need for this any more.

A clean start is in order. It won’t be a high-volume blog, but hopefully will be more about the things that interest me every day.

but first, there’s some pertyting up to be done. When I have time. Sigh.