Thursday, January 16, 2003

A two hour vacation

It's too nice to stay indoors. I'm going out. See ya later.

Way cool

Judith is back on the air again, making an interesting connection:

I have always felt that flowers and children are the same in that they have the intrinsic ability to thrive given food, water, sunshine and appropriate shelter. The best we can do for both children and flowers is provide the vital formula, then step back and watch them flourish.

Children will learn what they need to know in whatever circumstances they find themselves. In a formal educational setting, many children and adults will thrive and do well according to the designers and providers of the setting.

We have many different types of learners just as we have different types of flowers with different needs.

This is consistent, I think, with the Waldorf educational philosophy, which is high on my mind right now, since our kid goes to a Waldorf school, and we're tryng to raise money for a pretty big project the school is involved in right now.

It also jibes with my own school experience, which felt like prison.

Judith describes herself as an ADD (attention deficit disorder) type. So am I. Much as I hate the two negative Ds, the description applies. And it accounts almost entirely for why school and I generally didn't like each other. Maybe also for the fact that I'm a gardener too. (At least when I actually have a garden, which I don't right now.)

As fear fans out

Jay Sulzberger on Linux Journal: DMCA vs. Ham Radio? Jay invites the New Yorkers among us to hear Brett Wynkoop — familiar to many of us through Brooklyn On Line and New Yorkers for Fair Use — speak tonight on "Threats to Amateur Radio in a Digital Age."

Brett's a veteran ham radio operator. Wish I could say the same about myself. I got into it back in the early 60s, when I was in Junior High. My callsign was WV2VXH, or, in Morse code: .-- ...- ..--- ...- -..- .... . But I never got my general class license, because I kept flunking the code test, the last two times by missing a space. I gave up trying after I went off to a boarding school.

I still have my old receiver, though, in storage in North Carolina: a Hammarlund HQ-129X. Loved that thing. In addition to the ham stuff, I used it to pick up over 800 AM stations from all over the hemisphere from my bedroom in New Jersey, while my parents thought I was doing homework or sleeping. This was no small achievement, since there were only 106 AM channels (540 through 1600) in those days (recently the band has been extended to 1710), and we lived in Maywood, which is right off the corner of the New Jersey meadowlands, where most of the big New York AM stations locate their transmitters. (By the way, if you're into that kind of stuff, check out Jim Hawkins' pages on WMCA, WHN, WHOM, WADO, WABC and other stations. WABC's tower lights loomed above my bedroom window, and the signal was so strong you could hear it in the toaster, the TV's speaker — when the TV was off — and other unlikely places.)

Anyway, I've thought every once in awhile about getting back into ham radio. Nice fantasy, but no time.

Still, I'd love to hear what Brett says tonight.