Week before last, Geoff mentioned that the local Amateur Radio league (ARTS) was holding a testing session the following Friday at the local Red Cross. He figured I was a quick study, and let me borrow his somewhat-dated copy of Now You’re Talking: All You Need to Get Your First Ham Radio License, and I went about studying for my Technician license (the first rung of the ladder).

The old-timers will tell you (quite rightly) that the new HAM licensing is far easier than it was in the olden-days. Now, the entire question pool for the 35 question test is open to the public, and to you only have to pass a single 5 words-per-minute Morse code test. Youth wasted on the young! Well, I took many an online practice test, and even started learning CW (HAM shorthand for Morse code).

Friday (Good Friday) rolled around, and I took the Technician class exam at the Red Cross and passed! Geoff suggested I attempt the General class exam and the Morse Code while I was there, since I paid my $10. I missed 16 our of 35 on the General exam (not bad, considering I had only taken one practice exam for the General class license). Then I decided to attempt the 5 WPM Morse code test. The play you 5 minutes of a Morse code QSO (HAM-speak for a conversation), and you have to transcribe a least a solid minute. Oh lordy, that was tough. It was quite the embarassment, but at least I know more now about my enemy than before. Woo-hoo.

So that was Friday. They told me I’d have my callsign by Monday (today), and that it would be posted on the FCC’s website. Well, Monday is here, and who says the government is slow! I am now the proud owner of the call KI4EZO.

In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be studying for my Morse code, General and Extra class licenses.

this is quite geeky, but i’ve just completed a set of benchmarks for the webserver that this (and a few other) domains run on. I use Apache and PHP as the scripting language, and so I thought I’d try out Turck MMCache, a PHP optimizer. It did a good job with some of the slower sites on this box, like Louisville Soaring, but only showed marginal improvement on thelocust.org. Lost In Louisville is the reigning champ for speed, tho’, as it is completely static HTML.

Check out my results.

…so, the other day I decided to whip my MP3 collection back into shape with a better organization and naming convention, and to put good ID3 (v1 and v2) tags into them. The organization/naming convention I chose is as follows:

Artist/

 Album/

  Artist – Album – Track# – Title.mp3

Various Artists/Compilation/Soundtrack albums pose a different problem, so this file-level naming convention is a bit different:

Album – Track # – Artist – Title.mp3

I think that works out well. Any ideas?

I haven’t posted in terribly too long, but it’s been the holiday season, and I’ve been busy with family and work and some freelance stuff, and of course flying RC sailplanes! I just recented discovered slope soaring, and have had a blast the last two weekends down at the Frankfort slope.

I’m going to get a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 40 gig MP3 player for Christmas, and I’m psyched! My nearly 4 year obsession with portable jukeboxery come to fruition!

Things coming up include my and Kelly’s Christmas Day Oasis at our house, and Gary returns from Japan for a short while, and I think I’ll HOPEFULLY be launching the newly redesigned thelocust.org soon. Don’t hold your breath, please.

I fooled around with jpg2asc (jpeg to ascii converter) today, and also with manipulating the output with CSS to make it look right… well, here are the results. pretty cool stuff, tho’ the original image is 6k and the asciified version is 25k!

Yeah, i’ve looked at most of the PHP open-sourced content management systems out there… PHPNuke, PHPWebsite, PostNuke, none of them! I mean, PostNuke even has “Post” in the name! If they do have PostgreSQL support, then it’s either half-baked or in a state of disarray. It’s damned depressing as Postgres is very stable and has a lot of things that MySQL doesn’t have… ah well…

don’t worry, faithful readers. i’d suggest that you go check out this bad-ass piece of tech, the AudioPad.

TechTV has secured subpoenas from the RIAA and has created an “RIAA Hitlist of Kazaa users“. Wow. TechTV actually did something useful!

A buddy of mine at work and I were talking about whether or not we were still in a recession… and he linked me to this MSNBC article: Recession declared officially over. Hmm. Average recession: 11 months (roughly). Average span between recessions: 11 years. Sunspot cycle? 11 years. That’s damned creepy. Peep the NASA chart. I don’t make this stuff up. I’ve got corroborators.

GameSpy ‘s History of the Nintendo Family Computer (ne’ NES). It turned 20 on the 15th of July! Carpal Tunnel Syndrome hasn’t been the same since! A good article on Nintendo’s humble beginnings making playing cards in the late 1800′s up through today…