I stopped by the local Starbucks for my daily caffeine injection and while there I got a phone call from Brenda. Her and Jamie were traveling to northern Indiana for some school function and she was calling to let me know not to worry, our oldest son would be looking in on the dog.

Having a little time to kill I decided to catch up on email.

I hadn’t been there ten minutes when our second oldest son sent me an instant message. He and his wife are in San Jose, Costa Rica where they have managed to blend a little work and pleasure. We chatted for awhile and then I went back to reading the news and email until I was interrupted by a text message from my oldest son letting me know that he was indeed at our house right then taking care of the dog.

Good, things are all taken care of I thought.

Before I got out of the coffee shop I had another instant message – this time from my friend Niranjan who is in Bangalore, India. He saw me pop up on IM and just wanted to say hello and to say that life and work was good.

About then my wife called, she was three hours north of home, driving through a thunderstorm and wanted me to take a look at a weather map and let her know if she could expect to drive in that kind of weather for the entire trip. Luckily, the heavy stuff was mostly isolated.

Among the emails were a few from readers of this site scattered all over, along with one from a friend in California, and another from a friend in Cincinnati who had attached a photo he took while on a recent hiking trip.

Data bouncing around from Georgia, Indiana, Costa Rica, Bangalore, California, Cincinnati – all before breakfast and all on my cell phone.

Folks would have killed for this sort of instant communication technology just fifty years ago, but we’ve become fairly jaded by it all. After all, it’s as common as pouring a cold, clean glass of water these days – something else our ancestors would likely have killed for.

Direct link to this video and this one to all of the GoatTube productions…

“The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) has been all over the news in recent months. The lawyer group sued thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly file-shared motion pictures belonging to their clients, including the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. However, it turns out that USCG are not copyright purists either, as they have blatantly copied the website of a competitor without permission.” [via TorrentFreak]

“Rights” are slippery little suckers, aren’t they?

The vendor arrived on time and we sat down in a conference room.

Business long ago became the most powerful and important of all the religions on the planet and it includes its own peculiar rites, passages and ablutions, one of them being the time honored swapping of the cards. I’ve been in meetings with as many as thirty people trading cards with each other in a bizarre looking ritual that sometimes takes longer than the actual meeting.

Oddly enough, there’s an application for iPhone and Android that allows two phones to be "bumped" together which triggers the automatic exchange of business card data electronically but I doubt that will catch on, its much too progressive. Congregants of the Church of Business are mostly orthodox and insist on paper cards – King James if they can get them. 

I know enough not to mess with folks strongly held beliefs and superstitions so we traded business cards.

And right about then his cell phone sounded a now familiar call: "DROID"

He quickly moved to silence it but having recently become the owner of a new Droid X I asked him about his phone and we proceeded to spend a pleasant twenty minutes talking all things Android.

His office had adopted the platform in a big way. The phones were company issue and made extensive use of sipdroid, a VoIP application that allows calls to his office extension to be routed directly to his phone, wherever he happens to be.

Then he showed me his laptop. It was running Gentoo with the KDE desktop so of course we needed another half hour to talk about Linux and Open Source and how his company had integrated it into their everyday operations.

That ended up being one of the more interesting meetings that I’ve attended in some time, of course, something like that is bound to happen when you encounter a real geek in the wild.

I’ve been using the same hosting provider for this site since 2000 with generally good results so I’m not anxious to pull the plug on them, though for awhile yesterday I was beginning to wonder if they had gone out of business and just pulled the plug on me, so to speak.

I want to see how things go over the next few days before making any sudden moves.

Hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad, watermelon, swimming, fishing, ham radio – does it get any better than this?

It does on Cornbread Road where everything has been carefully planned, right down to the the mosquitoes.

Cornbread Road #5.mp3

Subscribe to the Podcast feed: http://ke9v.net/podcast.xml

Cornbread Road is a different kind of ham radio podcast. It’s an audio experiment, an episodic mystery in thirteen parts being released between the Solstice and the Equinox in 2010.

Don’t miss it!

According to the ARRL, last year was very good and the first six months of 2010 even better:

“With more than 18,000 new Amateur Radio licenses issued in the first half of this year — 18, 270 to be exact — 2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for Amateur Radio. So far, the number of new licenses issued by the FCC in 2010 is outpacing the January-June 2009 totals by almost 8.5 percent; at this time last year, the FCC had issued 16,844 new licenses”.

Good for us!

But lost in that good news is one question that deserves an answer: what is bringing them in?

Is it renewed vigor in local clubs? Perhaps it has something to do with the newly minted ARRL Web site, or its forays into social media like Twitter or Facebook? Is it a particular book or magazine, a new iPhone app, or maybe a combination of all the above?

It certainly seems important to get to the heart of the matter so the hobby/service can keep doing whatever it is that is bringing record numbers of new hams into the fold.

I haven’t observed any new television or radio marketing schemes promoting amateur radio. I haven’t kept track, but it certainly feels like ham radio is getting more attention in local newspapers though it may be that we are only recognizing that now thanks to Google.

Could it have something to do with that different looking man with the unusual name who sits in the Oval Office? That certainly seemed to ignite the sale of guns and ammunition last year. Has ham radio become a refuge for survivalists and those awaiting a Thunderdome conclusion to life as we know it?

What do we know from the data that we do track – have you noticed an uptick in the usage of your local repeater? Are we seeing larger crowds attending hamfests? Has anyone noted a significant increase in the number of radio contesting entrants?

I’m simply curious – what is bringing new blood into an old hobby and what are these new operators finding so interesting about it?

Enquiring minds want to know. The comment section is wide open, operators are standing by…

Now if there were only some way to scrub the use of "ton" when it doesn’t relate to a specific measure of weight:

"We’ve got a ton of new ideas…"
"…there are a ton of people waiting outside"
"I’ve got a ton of 2N2222′s in my junk box…"

Sigh.

Deep in the Heartland a small group of ham radio enthusiasts enjoy an idyllic existence of wide open spaces, no antenna restrictions, low-noise levels, simple living, and good fellowship. But things aren’t exactly what they seem on Cornbread Road…

The first four episodes are available for download right now, come and get ‘em but do listen in order.

I’ve taken a brief and planned pause in the release schedule that seems to have raised a few concerns among members of the CRTS but not to worry, episodes five and six are being released this week. All is well on Cornbread Road – at least as well as it ever gets there.

It’s getting to be a load of listening so if you haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon you need to get jumping soon or be left behind!

I started seeing the trailer for Inception months ago and wasn’t too impressed. But once you’ve seen most everything currently playing, the options become considerably narrow and so last week I watched it.

Wow, what a great movie!

Despite it’s strong box office, the critics were none too kind – which just goes to show that most movie critics don’t live in the same dimension as me.

I’ve often noticed that movie reviews and my evaluation of those movies are complete opposites and it never occurred to me to wonder why that was so, at least not until I read, 7 Reasons Why Techies Love Inception. Of course being a geek will lead you to stand in line for the latest Star Trek movie tickets, but Inception wasn’t really promoted as a Sci-Fi thriller. But as Hagel points out, it’s a successful mash-up of multiple genres:

“The movie combines science fiction, espionage, con games and action movie elements, with requisite car chases and gun battles, spiced up by some excellent special effects”

There’s nothing particularly profound to take away from the movie, no deep messaging like with Avatar, though there was one observation that I had never before considered and now I can’t get it out of my head. Without being too much of a spoiler, the movie involves dreaming – and includes the ability for multiple people to share a single dream which leads to frequent uncertainty about what is real and what is a dream.

When Leonardo DiCaprio introduces Ellen Page to the process the two are together somewhere else. When she realizes they are dreaming, and not really standing outside a Parisian café, she asks him how she can know when she’s in a dream. DiCaprio asked her, “how did we get here?” a question she couldn’t answer. Dreams, he told her, always start somewhere but you never know how you got there, the dream picks up from that point in time and moves along. In a vivid dream you may remember being in a baseball stadium with your friends, but you can’t remember waking up that morning, getting dressed, and later driving to the ball park, etc.

In that strange way, dreams are a specific detail without the background to fully understand everything that’s going on around them. It’s little wonder that waking after a particularly heavy dream period leaves us feeling a bit confused and befuddled, at least until we become fully awake.

Now today, I plan on seeing the new movie Salt.

That way, if I do a little dreaming, it might be about Angelina Jolie!