Your cost-saving government at work

OK, regulars know that I rarely do anything political on this little self-indulgence I call a blog.  I would usually rather talk about technological change, media and my beloved hobby of amateur radio.  I'm not apolitical, though.  Just hard to pin down or label according to the usual definitions.  Truth is I am way, way conservative on some things and way, way liberal on others.  Add it all up and I guess it puts me--on average--somewhere near the middle.

But our government's proclivity to spend more and more and more money that we don't have is really bothering me lately.  Even with tax season and the usual awareness of how much of my income gets sucked in, I do maintain that I don't mind paying my fair share.  If I had even an inkling that the various governments out there were being good stewards of those involuntary contributions I make.

That's why I thought this bit of whimsy I received in my email today was especially appropriate:

President Obama has given his cabinet instructions to cut $100 million from the $3.5 trillion federal budget!  I'm so impressed by this sacrifice that I have decided to do the same thing with my personal budget. I spend about $2000 a month on groceries, medicine, bills, etc, but it's time to get out the budget cutting ax, go line by line through my expenses, and see what I can do.

I'm going to cut my spending at exactly the same ratio -1/35,000 of my total budget. After doing the math, it looks like instead of spending $2000 a month, I'm going to have to cut that number by six cents!



Yes, I'm going to have to get by with spending $1999.94, but that's what sacrifice is all about. I'll just have to do without some things, that are, frankly, luxuries. I expect all of you to follow the lead of our president and I and make similar sacrifices.

Just plain fun

Look, I'll be the first to admit that amateur radio is not a hobby for everyone.  I even wrote an article about the subject for the eHam.net web site.  But for a bunch of us--and we are not all nerds, geeks, or sparks-for-brains--the hobby offers a lot. 

Some love it for the technical aspect, and the hobby continues to lead the way with new and innovative ways to involve computers, wi-fi, and the Internet with our radios.  (My own things are antennas and propagation, and with the unusual nature of sunspot cycle 24 and how it affects us all in more ways than most folks know, it is a fascinating time for us solar flux watchers!)

Others like radiosport, using their "rigs" in active competition with other hams around the world in contests or chasing operators in rare, exotic places.  (I am a casual contester, too, since it is a good way to learn more about propagation and how my homebrew aerials perform...plus it is just a lot of fun!  There is a group of hams about to set up and operate on Spratley Island...bet you never heard of it.  And I talked to a station operating from the Japanese exploration base in Antarctica the other day.  Heck, you can even talk to the International Space Station as it orbits above earth.)

Still others like helping out in emergency situations, and perform valuable public service.  A lot of us simply enjoy chatting with like-minded people around the planet.  (I had an enjoyable conversation ["QSO"] with a fellow in Latvia yesterday, and exchanged signal reports with guys in Namibia, French Polynesia, Latvia, European Russia...and Nashville, Tennessee...just in the last few days.)

Here's a great video of a ham in Melbourne, Australia, showing us his set-up in a park in the city where he just likes to go operate for a while, using solar power and a simple radio station.  You can hear the joy in his voice!

Okay.  Enough selling.  If you are interested...click here for more info on the hobby.

Don Keith N4KC
http://www.n4kc.com/
http://www.donkeith.com/

That picture of me

I have a photo I use on my web sites and even here on this blog.  It was taken about ten years ago by a photographer from a local daily newspaper (like so many daily papers, it is now defunct) for an article they were doing on me.  When my book editor at St. Martin's Press saw the photo, he said, "That's a good shot.  You should use it as your publicity photo."

Bob Wyatt was seldom wrong so I did.  And now, as I am on the verge of having my daughter-in-law, who is a good photographer, take some new pictures for that use, I am reminded of a telling exchange I had recently with a young person regarding the photo.  An exchange that fits the theme of this blog exactly.

"Don, what is that thing in the picture?" he asked.

Thinking he meant the "old-fashioned" CRT monitor, those big monsters that you can't even give away anymore at garage sales.  I told him.

"No, not that."

"Oh, the mouse," I said.  "There was a time when mice had cords that actually plugged into the computer."

"No, not that," he persevered.  "I mean that black thing over there next to the lamp.  The thing with the twisty cord on it."

Then I realized he was talking about my desk phone.  I tried to explain to him that telephones once had cords that not only ran between the headset and the main part of the 'phone, but had to plug into something in the wall, too.  You couldn't walk all around the house talking because you couldn't get any farther away from the phone itself than the "twisty cord" could reach.

He blinked a few times and finally said, "Yeah, I think my grandma had one of those one time."  I didn't even try to describe rotary dials and such arcane stuff as that.  And I also resisted the impuse to ask him if he was familiar with phone booths.

Do you realize how many people do not even have landline telephones at home anymore?  And will never know about cords, wall plugs, long-distance charges, party lines, telephones without video screens and apps...

Similar thing hit me just yesterday.  A group of us were talking about what our kids and grandkids got for Christmas (my darling Alexa got a Barnes & Noble Nook, bless her heart) and one fellow said his kid got a CD.  A CD album, with songs on it.  She had no idea what it was.  And then Dad realized the only things they had that would play it was their BluRay player or their computer.  Finally, it dawned on them--on the kid first and then her old man--that she needed to get on the computer and put the tracks she wanted into her iTunes folder so she could download them to her iPod.

Have you tried to describe a 33-and-a-third record album or a 45 RPM record to anyone under 30?  Of dragging a needle through a groove on a piece of plastic and amplifying the resulting vibrations as a way of playing music?

Of having to buy a whole album of bad songs to get the one or two that you really wanted to own?

Save your breath for talking on the telephone.

Don Keith N4KC
http://www.n4kc.com/
http://www.donkeith.com/
www.facebook.com/donkeith

THE DIGITAL STORY OF THE NATIVITY

I don't think anything says "change!" any better than this. Enjoy...

Don Keith N4KC
www.n4kc.com
www.donkeith.com
www.facebook.com/donkeith

Fun with graphs and charts

Want a really cool way to demonstrate the progress of man over the last few centuries.  Here it is.  And it's fun!



See.  Numbers can be kind of cool.  Plus you can see easily that everything is NOT going to hell in a handbasket!

Don Keith N4KC
http://www.n4kc.com/
http://www.donkeith.com/
www.facebook.com/donkeith

A few words about criticism

Someone once said, "If you believe the good reviews, you have to believe the bad ones, too."

I totally agree.  After a long career in broadcasting and now, with over twenty books in print, you can be sure that I have seen my share of both.  When my first novel was published, THE FOREVER SEASON, I could hardly wait for that first round of reviews.  Based on my very experienced editor's feedback, I just knew they would be uniformly glowing.  Not so.  Both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, the two sources in which those in the publishing industry put the most stock, were awful.  Never mind that few potential readers ever see these--unless the publishing house yanks them out as blurbs when they are positive and puts them on covers and press releases that zoom out to the masses.  And never mind that we got scores of other reviews that were absolutely wonderful and never--to this day--ever received another negative one. 

You see, those two highly subjective reviews caused the sales and publicity staff at St. Martins Press to totally lose interest and move on to other books that were not roasted in PW and LJ.

Now, jump ahead fifteen years.  Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can post reviews on such sites as Amazon.com and Bestreads.com.  It does not matter if they have read the book or not.  Or whether or not they like the way the author combs his hair.  They can give glowing reviews for no good reason or completely pan an author's work, based on any criteria they want.  And people considering purchasing those books can't really tell which reviews are helpful and which ones are garbage.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
I admit I check travel review sites when I am booking a hotel, and I read the customer reviews and consider their rankings.  In my ham radio hobby, if I am considering a purchase, I go to eham.net and scroll through user reviews, and take that into consideration.  I even take time to post reviews on those sites in an effort to be helpful to others, and try my best to remain objective. 
I'm sure hotels, restaurants, and amateur radio equipment manufacturers--among others--have developed thick skins.  I wonder how many even bother to check the reviews they are getting on these sites.
It is a little tougher, though, for folks like authors.  We bleed and sweat to make our works as good as we can make them.  Then, we have some uninformed or prejudiced yahoo call our baby ugly for no good reason!
Hey, I'm a big boy, and I know what I do will not appeal to everyone.  Constructive criticism is always welcomed.  So is fact-correcting.  But when I see "reader comments" that are scathing, based on purely arbitrary opinions, it bothers me.  I have one fellow who has posted lengthy diatribes on several of my World War II submarine books (I have resisted replying to him on the actual sites where they appear because I don't want to legitimize his rants, but I do appreciate others who have commented on his stuff.). If his points were consistent or made any sense, I would accept them and move on, but it appears he has an almost personal axe to grind.  Truth is, he is so far off base, it doesn't hurt my feelings at all.  But the trouble is, I know the comments could negatively impact book sales.  And that does bother me on several levels.

First, he apparently has not read the books since he makes mistakes about names, dates, and many of the facts.  He chides me for not giving more detail and then makes an issue of the amount of detail I give in other areas.  He wants footnotes and sources like a scholarly work, not understanding that these books are not intended to be that at all, but human stories of real people in extraordinary circumstances.  And they are not written as historical record or analysis for scholars, but for people looking for good, real stories that just happen to be true, and may not know much about WWII history or submarines.  I only try to tell enough to put the events and personalities into context.  He rants about my boring style in one sentence then talks about how the good writing style masks a lack of scholarly historical analysis in another.  He also seems to think that my not being a former submariner prohibits me from being able to tell these stories about submariners.
Yes, a few factual errors creep in...some my fault, some not...in a book as full of facts as these are.  It always galls me when a book typesetter or line editor accidentally changes a date or number.  We just corrected a fewof those in the upcoming paperback release of WAR BENEATH THE WAVES. These manuscripts have had many eyes of well-informed people on them, including men who spent a large portion of their lives on submarines did not catch them and others who actually lived through what I write about.  And, by the way, none of them are major flaws at all.  (The one I keep hearing about is a wrong number I gave when converting knots to miles-per-hour when talking about the speed of a Japanese destroyer...and we still don't know where that bogus number in the text came from...I know the formula!)
So I guess my question is, how do we deflect misdirected arrows of criticism when everybody with a keyboard has a quiver full of arrows?  Or should we?  With the hotel and amateur radio gear reviews, the sheer volume of input allows us to quickly cull the outliers--pro or con.  It's the same concept as Wikipedia, where incorrect info is immediately corrected by all the army of people looking at it.  If a ham radio antenna has a 4.8-out-of-5 average rating after 200 reviews, I am probably not going to pay much attention to the one guy who gave it a zero unless he has a darn good reason.  However, on most books with limited sales--like mine--one or two negative reviews carry a lot of weight when Amazon starts adding up the stars. 
Just like Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.
Don Keith N4KC
http://www.n4kc.com/
http://www.donkeith.com/
www.facebook.com/donkeith
www.twitter.com/don_keith

Things that are going bye-bye

Got an interesting email today, talking about all the things we take for granted--things most of us assume will always be with us--that will soon be gone, ready or not.  I disagree with a couple of them.  But as change inevitably erases the un-erasable, look for many of these things to soon be gone bye-bye:

• The Post Office.  (Saw one of the USPS's top bureaucrats on TV the other day justifying his archaic department by talking about how mail carriers check on the elderly and report fires and crime.  Sigh.)
• The check.  I could add cash money, too.  Both rapidly going away, replaced by plastic and cyber-money.
• The newspaper.  I've talked about that here before.  No more ink on your hands. News that is 24 hours old?  How twentieth century!
• The book.  I'm not convinced that the traditional paper book is gone just yet.  Other ways to read?  Sure, and as an author, anything that encourages people to read and makes it easier for them to buy "books" is fine with me.  But I still think enough people like the feel, portability, and ease of use so that they'll still have to print and bind them for a while yet.
• Land line telephone.  A given.  When cell service is good enough at my house, bye-bye land line.
• Music.  (?)  The writer says that since nobody exposes good, new music, the entire genre is self-destructing.  I think new ways of exposing are emerging.  Exciting days are coming.
• Television.  Yes, for over-the-air or cable, and for the big four networks.  No for video.  Our grandkids will not know the difference.  TV is moving pictures on a screen of some kind.  Moving pictures are moving pictures, whether it comes from a tower on a hill or via wireless.
• Computers with hard drives and data stored on CDs/DVDs.  It's all going to the "cloud."  Everything you would normally keep on your machine will reside out there in the ether somewhere...software, data, pictures.  And you will use myriad devices to access it, not just a desktop computer.
• Privacy.  'Nuff said.

Agree?

Don Keith N4KC
http://www.n4kc.com/
http://www.donkeith.com/
www.facebook.com/donkeith