I finally decided to give blogging a shot. It seems like it’s going to be a lot easier to keep up to date than constantly modifying pages on the website via HTML. Or even a WYSIWYG editor. So, the news and comments you find here will be a bit more timely than much of the info on the rest of the site. Now, that’s certainly not to say that the rest of the site is stale — far from it. It’s just that the blog, by its very nature, will inevitably be more current. We’ll be talking primarily about amateur radio, emergency communications and renewable energy here. But I reserve the right to ramble on about anything that inspires me on a given day. That good with you? Great! Let’s carry on.
I’m writing this at 2146 on 31 October. About 4 hours and 14 minutes from now, we’ll perform that semi-annual bit of idiocy called the “Time Change”. Why, I ask rhetorically, is that necessary? If folks don’t like driving home from work in the dark, why not just open the businesses earlier and close earlier? I’m guessing that from time immemorial, our ancestors — not the so-called civilized ones — but the ones that lived in harmony with Mother Nature, just adjusted to the yearly cycle of longer and shorter periods of daylight and did their hunting and gathering (and eventually their agricultural pursuits) in whatever daylight was available. If we lived in sync with Nature, time would be just a number and we could just adjust our lives to fit in with the cycles of the Earth and forget all about changing those clocks we’re slaves to. In the summer, we could run the businesses from 0800 to 1700 and in the winter from 0700 to 1600. Save a lot of clock changing and folks getting to work an hour early or an hour late the day after the change. I know that’ll never happen, but I wish it could. Told you this would be a ‘timely’ conversation <G>
OK, time for some good information that’s not one of my pet peeves. Just wanted to mention a couple of other blogs that are related to what we talk about here. Bill Allen, WA5PB, has a blog about ham radio and the *NIX family of operating systems for computers. Bill’s a UNIX guru and his blog will make you want to give up Microthought Windoze and migrate to a real OS like Ubuntu Linux. Check it out at: http://wa5pb.freeshell.org/blog/
Steve Spence is one of the best when it comes to renewable energy and off-grid living. He’s been off-grid in upstate New York for several years, been busy converting vehicles to run on biodiesel and veggie oil, built a few wind generators from scratch and knows whereof he speaks. You can find his blog — and a lot of other really useful information at: http://www.green-trust.org/wordpress/
Don’t forget to change your clocks tonight before you go to bed. That way, you’ll know what time it is when you wake up!
73,
ldb
K5WLF