It's been a while since my last post here, because I meant to devote this blog to the paper route and not much new has happened on the paper route. For example, when I did my first-ever-since-owning-the-route, taking of a Sunday off to go canoeing in the Chesapeake in the late spring, it was a complete non-event, as I'd expected it to be, because that's how good my substitute is.
It's been a while since I bothered to take the bike along on the delivery; running is easy enough, and I still haven't gotten around to doing the additional fixing-up that I've been meaning to do on the devoted-to-the-purpose, paperboying bike. But by fixing it up as much as I did last winter, one thing that I learned was that even the crappiest-looking triple chainring, from almost any one of the big-box-store bikes in my junkpile, works fine (even for a "real" cyclist, such as you or I, who is generally bigoted against big-box-store bike parts and prefers bike-shop bike parts - you see I accumulate rusty-but-largely-unworn, big-box-store bike parts because the neighbors are always adding them to my junkpiles).
Meanwhile, my primary bike - a '70s-or-'80s Fuji road bike that I've been using since 1999 after a neighbor added _it_ to my junk pile - had been more and more in need of a new rear wheel lately. Well actually, the only things wrong with its rear wheel were that the pain-in-the-ass sealed bearing has been loose for many thousands of miles, and the freewheel on it was only compatible with my worn chain because I was too much of a turkey to buy a new chain for the last 3 years. That worn chain had also worn out the latest chainring of the proudly-single-chainring crankset that I'd been using for at least 10 (oops - not 17 as I just erroneously boasted on the BicyclingAdvocacy yahoo group) years and being vainglorious about the virtues of the simplicity of.
But this spring, I happened to get a very good rear wheel with a 34-tooth freewheel (_another_ thing I hadn't had in years) at the flea market for $30. Last weekend, I finally got around to putting it on (on my primary bike), together with an old junk triple chainring just like the one that I'd put on the devoted-to-paper-boying bike last winter.
Riding my primary bike with a front derailleur on it for the first time in years, made it such a pleasure to ride, that it produced a significant weekly-milage jump! For example, I rode it to Clarks Summit yesterday morning even though it had barely been over a week since the last time I'd included Clarks Summit on a ride itinerary.
My inspiration for choosing Clarks Summit as a ride destination yesterday was paper-route-related: This past Sunday, I'd accidentally delivered a paper to a house that was supposed to be on vacation stop. It's not good for a paper to be sitting in front of a house all week advertising that nobody's home; so, yesterday, when I was having my usual mid-week craving of a McDonald's breakfast and it was a choice of either Gibson (10 miles north), Carbondale (13 miles southeast) or Clarks Summit (17 miles south), I picked Clarks Summit.
But when I got to the particular house that I wanted to "steal" the Sunday paper from (it was 9 am or so by then), the garage door of it was open and there were people working in there; so, being shy as I am, I simply rode by, figuring, "They're back home already", even though the Sunday paper was still sitting on their front porch untouched.
It took until a few blocks later for the slight screwballity of this to dawn on me: If the people working in the garage were the owners, why was the Sunday paper still untouched? Well, maybe they were contractors or somesuch. Except, they didn't look like contractors; they looked like typical suburbanites. Then a few miles later, _another_ thing - namely something _about_ "typical" suburbanites - dawned on me: They're often so oblivious to what their own neighbors right across the street are doing, that burglars can go in and clean the place out in broad daylight!
Well, I think I'll just take the _non_-busybody approach and hope for the best, in view of what happened the one time - back in the early '70s when _I_ was one of those suburbanites - that I happened to be the only one who knew that the neighbor across the street was away for a week, noticed some strange people going in there, and got worried enough about it to troll my mom into calling the police: It turned out, after the police talked to them, that they _were_ just contractors or somesuch.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
General! - and Mr. Yagi
I think I told y'all some of the story of how, early on in my takeover of the route in 2007, I cooked up a set of homemade maps of the route.
It's been a long time since I looked at them myself more than once or twice per street, because I got so familiar with the streets after about the first year. But, it'll keep on being relevent for making it easy for my substitute (whom it looks like I'll be finally getting around to using one Sunday later in the spring), to maintain, on the maps, a detail or two about a house or two on each street (thereby making the rest of the houses on that street easy to locate also). And now I have one more detail to scribble in:
One of the customers has a ham radio antenna that, in late 2007, I happened to read in the Times-Tribune about a controversy about. As _my_ part in the controversy, for a while after reading about that, I went a few feet out of my way to give him his paper extra early, various times when it happened to be handy to do so - despite my own ham status being, as I confessed to y'all in "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", a lazily-just-renewing-since-the-1970s Novice.
Well, in an update of "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", I'm happy to report that last Wednesday, I went to Scranton (proudly still overdue for the same haircut that I'd been overdue for when I'd passed the arguably-a-_downgrade_-from-Novice, "Technician" on March 11) and passed the second of the three tests that I'd boasted that I was going to work on, and thereby upgraded to General. (I must give credit to www.aa9pw.com for the practice tests there, of which I've now begun working on the Extra.)
And one of the things that I've learned, is that the kind of antenna that that ham on the route has is a Yagi. So, I'll be writing "Yagi antenna" on the map.
My elmer boasts that he met the inventer of it, Mr. Yagi himself, at the end of WWII.
It's been a long time since I looked at them myself more than once or twice per street, because I got so familiar with the streets after about the first year. But, it'll keep on being relevent for making it easy for my substitute (whom it looks like I'll be finally getting around to using one Sunday later in the spring), to maintain, on the maps, a detail or two about a house or two on each street (thereby making the rest of the houses on that street easy to locate also). And now I have one more detail to scribble in:
One of the customers has a ham radio antenna that, in late 2007, I happened to read in the Times-Tribune about a controversy about. As _my_ part in the controversy, for a while after reading about that, I went a few feet out of my way to give him his paper extra early, various times when it happened to be handy to do so - despite my own ham status being, as I confessed to y'all in "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", a lazily-just-renewing-since-the-1970s Novice.
Well, in an update of "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", I'm happy to report that last Wednesday, I went to Scranton (proudly still overdue for the same haircut that I'd been overdue for when I'd passed the arguably-a-_downgrade_-from-Novice, "Technician" on March 11) and passed the second of the three tests that I'd boasted that I was going to work on, and thereby upgraded to General. (I must give credit to www.aa9pw.com for the practice tests there, of which I've now begun working on the Extra.)
And one of the things that I've learned, is that the kind of antenna that that ham on the route has is a Yagi. So, I'll be writing "Yagi antenna" on the map.
My elmer boasts that he met the inventer of it, Mr. Yagi himself, at the end of WWII.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Lackawanna Lake solid enough to bike on
My Thursday bike ride to Clarks Summit included riding right across the lake at Lackawanna State Park.
After the first few feet, before the water got deep, I dismounted and walked a little ways just to get a better feel for whether it was crackling (because I was entering in a slightly different place than the ice fishermen were, plus I suspect that a 27 x 1 1/4" or 1 3/8" tire concentrates the weight a little bit more than shoes do). But it wasn't crackling an iota, nor even hardly sagging (and years ago, logging with my tractor on the Frost Farm's beaver lake, I got away with making a whole bunch of trips with it sagging _a_ _lot_ - the trick is to just keep moving - but I was nuts back then), so I re-mounted and zipped right across, and up the boat ramp on the other side.
No knobbies; just slicks on my road bike. But traction was no problem, thanks to evenly-spaced patches of a thin crust of snow on the ice.
These sporadic weekday rides that I take to Clarks Summit are somewhat related to the paper route in that they're usually timed to include a stop at the distribution center when it's still open, to pick up a check.
Hmmm, I better hurry up and take an extra ride or two just to Lackawanna State Park; it got to be like spring yesterday so I bet I've only got a few more days to see if I can try riding the _length_ of that lake instead of just across it.
After the first few feet, before the water got deep, I dismounted and walked a little ways just to get a better feel for whether it was crackling (because I was entering in a slightly different place than the ice fishermen were, plus I suspect that a 27 x 1 1/4" or 1 3/8" tire concentrates the weight a little bit more than shoes do). But it wasn't crackling an iota, nor even hardly sagging (and years ago, logging with my tractor on the Frost Farm's beaver lake, I got away with making a whole bunch of trips with it sagging _a_ _lot_ - the trick is to just keep moving - but I was nuts back then), so I re-mounted and zipped right across, and up the boat ramp on the other side.
No knobbies; just slicks on my road bike. But traction was no problem, thanks to evenly-spaced patches of a thin crust of snow on the ice.
These sporadic weekday rides that I take to Clarks Summit are somewhat related to the paper route in that they're usually timed to include a stop at the distribution center when it's still open, to pick up a check.
Hmmm, I better hurry up and take an extra ride or two just to Lackawanna State Park; it got to be like spring yesterday so I bet I've only got a few more days to see if I can try riding the _length_ of that lake instead of just across it.
Oops, I was too quick to compliment PennDOT
That traffic signal does not detect a bicycle!
Therefore, it fails the Susquehanna County Wheelmen Triad Compliance Spot Check, which I happened to conduct on it at 2:45am 3/1/09.
Obviously, this blog isn't being read by my PennDOT-bigwig, cycling-event-participant-buddy customer after all.
The Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm requires that cyclists act and be treated as driver of vehicles. Readers of SCW's sporadic newsletter "The Triadal Core Protection Forum" (which has been on its duff since 2004 and which this blog semi-supercedes) will recall my rarely-limited-to-Susquehanna-County spoutings about how basic it is for a traffic signal to detect a metal bike like it detects any other vehicle (and about how ultra-yuppies with carbon fiber bikes, on the other hand, can be left out with unshod horses as far as I'm concerned - I'm practical, too, you see).
But it usually takes a while for a rural-resident cyclist such as myself (even in my own county, all three of the traffic-light towns in which are even further from the Frost Farm than Clarks Summit is) to happen to be cycling through a signalized intersection at a sufficiently wee hour (i.e. with no cars around to trip the signal for me and thereby hide the problem) to apprehend it failing to detect me. That is why, for example, the SCW Systematic Ride of Susquehanna County - a several-year project that I completed in 2000 although I never got around to sifting through the data therefrom afterwards - had to include 3am-start editions for at least one each, of its Montrose, Hallstead and Susquehanna legs.
In Lackawanna County and partly for similar reasons, this blog's previous discussions about our most-impeding-of-paper-carriers-in-Clarks-Summit traffic signal - namely the one where we turn left onto rt. 11 next to the video store while leaving the distribution center - focused on how long that signal took to respond, and sometimes not respond, to the presence of our motor vehicles. Besides distance from home, the other part of the reason I focused only on the motoring aspect was that, as I discussed back in "About the name of this blog", this blog makes no apologies for the fact that motoring is current state of the art of how I always do at least certain parts of the route (and that applies especially to how I leave the distribution center, when I have the full load).
So it took me until 3/1/09 - two years into doing this route - to happen to get a chance to do an SCW Triad Compliance Spot Check of this particular traffic signal.
3/1 just happened to be the second Sunday in a row that I'd arrived at the distribution center at 2:30 instead of my usual 3:45 (because my Route Associate was taking a well-deserved couple of Saturdays off from preparing the inside sections for me, and this time I'd finally worked up enough guts to try the more challenging version of preparing them myself, namely waiting until Sunday morning to do it instead of taking any Saturday trip to Clarks Summit). The previous Sunday, 2/22, I'd found the distribution center to be already open at 2:30 (instead of the apparently-usual 3:00), but on 3/1, it wasn't; so, I had some time to kill.
I used some of that time by yanking the bike down from the pickup truck and riding it the couple hundred feet to that traffic light.
And there I sat for a whole 4 minutes or more (entertained, at least, by punks in the parking lot of the restaurant across the street who were having a little bit too much of a fracus to notice me), and then I turned around.
I also found, later that same morning while going through that intersection with my pickup truck as usual after loading the papers, that it's back to taking a minute or two (as opposed to the "instantly" of 2/15 and 2/22) to turn green for a motor vehicle.
Therefore, it fails the Susquehanna County Wheelmen Triad Compliance Spot Check, which I happened to conduct on it at 2:45am 3/1/09.
Obviously, this blog isn't being read by my PennDOT-bigwig, cycling-event-participant-buddy customer after all.
The Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm requires that cyclists act and be treated as driver of vehicles. Readers of SCW's sporadic newsletter "The Triadal Core Protection Forum" (which has been on its duff since 2004 and which this blog semi-supercedes) will recall my rarely-limited-to-Susquehanna-County spoutings about how basic it is for a traffic signal to detect a metal bike like it detects any other vehicle (and about how ultra-yuppies with carbon fiber bikes, on the other hand, can be left out with unshod horses as far as I'm concerned - I'm practical, too, you see).
But it usually takes a while for a rural-resident cyclist such as myself (even in my own county, all three of the traffic-light towns in which are even further from the Frost Farm than Clarks Summit is) to happen to be cycling through a signalized intersection at a sufficiently wee hour (i.e. with no cars around to trip the signal for me and thereby hide the problem) to apprehend it failing to detect me. That is why, for example, the SCW Systematic Ride of Susquehanna County - a several-year project that I completed in 2000 although I never got around to sifting through the data therefrom afterwards - had to include 3am-start editions for at least one each, of its Montrose, Hallstead and Susquehanna legs.
In Lackawanna County and partly for similar reasons, this blog's previous discussions about our most-impeding-of-paper-carriers-in-Clarks-Summit traffic signal - namely the one where we turn left onto rt. 11 next to the video store while leaving the distribution center - focused on how long that signal took to respond, and sometimes not respond, to the presence of our motor vehicles. Besides distance from home, the other part of the reason I focused only on the motoring aspect was that, as I discussed back in "About the name of this blog", this blog makes no apologies for the fact that motoring is current state of the art of how I always do at least certain parts of the route (and that applies especially to how I leave the distribution center, when I have the full load).
So it took me until 3/1/09 - two years into doing this route - to happen to get a chance to do an SCW Triad Compliance Spot Check of this particular traffic signal.
3/1 just happened to be the second Sunday in a row that I'd arrived at the distribution center at 2:30 instead of my usual 3:45 (because my Route Associate was taking a well-deserved couple of Saturdays off from preparing the inside sections for me, and this time I'd finally worked up enough guts to try the more challenging version of preparing them myself, namely waiting until Sunday morning to do it instead of taking any Saturday trip to Clarks Summit). The previous Sunday, 2/22, I'd found the distribution center to be already open at 2:30 (instead of the apparently-usual 3:00), but on 3/1, it wasn't; so, I had some time to kill.
I used some of that time by yanking the bike down from the pickup truck and riding it the couple hundred feet to that traffic light.
And there I sat for a whole 4 minutes or more (entertained, at least, by punks in the parking lot of the restaurant across the street who were having a little bit too much of a fracus to notice me), and then I turned around.
I also found, later that same morning while going through that intersection with my pickup truck as usual after loading the papers, that it's back to taking a minute or two (as opposed to the "instantly" of 2/15 and 2/22) to turn green for a motor vehicle.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Thank you, PennDOT!
I'm happy to report a snippet or two of evidence that this blog has at least some readership among the route's customers.
The main such snippet is that on both the 2/15 and 2/22 deliveries, the "unresponsive" traffic signal that I'd spouted off about in this blog less than two weeks earlier, turned green _instantly_ in response to my pickup truck's presence! Voila, two minutes shaved off my delivery time; the easiest two minutes I've ever shaved off.
That had _never_ happened before at that particular signal, in my whole two years of doing the route. When it happened on 2/15, I thought it might be a freak, but when it happened again on 2/22, there was no longer any doubt that PennDOT had done something.
The prime "suspect" of who to hereby thank (just like in 2007 when he got a certain new "Motor Vehicles Only" sign removed from the ramp leading from Business Rt. 6 onto Rt. 11 northbound just west of Dickson City after I'd spouted off on the internet about _that_, thereby upholding cyclists' Right to Travel from Scranton to Clarks Summit, Lenoxville or Canada) is a certain customer on the route who happens to also be a PennDOT bigwig and cycling-event-participation buddy of mine, going back years before I became a paper boy.
A second snippet of evidence, this one admittedly less definitive, that customers might be reading this blog (or equally likely in this case: they read the obituaries in the 2/11 Times-Tribune) is that on the door of another customer, I found a sympathy card, which I also hereby thank them for.
The main such snippet is that on both the 2/15 and 2/22 deliveries, the "unresponsive" traffic signal that I'd spouted off about in this blog less than two weeks earlier, turned green _instantly_ in response to my pickup truck's presence! Voila, two minutes shaved off my delivery time; the easiest two minutes I've ever shaved off.
That had _never_ happened before at that particular signal, in my whole two years of doing the route. When it happened on 2/15, I thought it might be a freak, but when it happened again on 2/22, there was no longer any doubt that PennDOT had done something.
The prime "suspect" of who to hereby thank (just like in 2007 when he got a certain new "Motor Vehicles Only" sign removed from the ramp leading from Business Rt. 6 onto Rt. 11 northbound just west of Dickson City after I'd spouted off on the internet about _that_, thereby upholding cyclists' Right to Travel from Scranton to Clarks Summit, Lenoxville or Canada) is a certain customer on the route who happens to also be a PennDOT bigwig and cycling-event-participation buddy of mine, going back years before I became a paper boy.
A second snippet of evidence, this one admittedly less definitive, that customers might be reading this blog (or equally likely in this case: they read the obituaries in the 2/11 Times-Tribune) is that on the door of another customer, I found a sympathy card, which I also hereby thank them for.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark
The radio hams among my valued readers will know that the "sk" that I whimsically ended my last post with means "silent key". Sk is used by hams to sign off at the end of a transmission, or, less routinely, to refer to a deceased fellow ham. For example, "Silent Keys" is the name of the obituary section of the American Radio Relay League's magazine "QST".
My dad's call sign as an Extra Class ham is K3DM. I say "is" rather than "was", because based on the last time that I checked his licence at the FCC's website (earlier today), the FCC doesn't know yet that he's a Silent Key. And, based on what I'm suddenly beginning to learn: Shhhhhhhhhhhh! Each day that it takes them to find out, gives me that much more of a valuable delay in the start of a two-year countdown to a formidable deadline that I'm about to describe.
The only way to get that short of a call sign is to be Extra Class, which is the hardest-to-earn, most elite ham licence of all. There are very few Extra Class hams around, but my dad and I knew of one other one here in Susquehanna County.
This other Extra Class ham started coming around here to the Frost Farm in the last few days, telling me that I'm first in line to get the call sign K3DM and that I should try to get it before somebody outside the family snaps it up. Once the FCC learns that it's a Silent Key, I'll only have a two-year window in which to meet the important other (i.e. besides who I am) requirement for getting it. That other requirement is, I must become Extra Class.
Well that's a _very_ tall order. I, KA3CZN, have been sitting on the duff of Novice class ever since the 1970s, partly because my cows knocked over the dipole, but also largely because I considered the mere thought of trying to learn enough to upgrade to even _General_ class to be _intimidating_.
But several things happened in the last few days that have made me decide to accept the challenge. In particular, I've had it up to my _eyeballs_ with the various aspects of modern technology that are similar to the phenomenon that I vented about earlier on this blog, about how nose-ring-generation-type, text-messaging punks don't even know that what they're doing is way more complicated to learn than, and inferior to, Morse Code.
In one example, there was an editorial in yesterday's Scranton Times-Tribune that sounded as if _I_ could have wrote it; that's how much I agreed with it. It was by a guy bashing the governmental requirement for the switch to digital TV. The guy didn't bash the _concept_ of switching to digital; just the fact that it was being done by too-central of planning (which, for example, neglects localities that won't receive the digital signal even with the best equipment) and with the coupons for the converter boxes keeping the price of the converter boxes artificially high.
The editorial, together with other recent snippets from other sources, also confirmed my suspicion that the coupons are indeed a government subsidy to the industry. So, that settles it: I'm _not_ going to bother getting a converter box; not until maybe after my TV has gone dark for a few months and the converter boxes start showing up at flea markets for $5.
Another example, also from yesterday, was the straw that broke the camel's back:
I was trying to hang up on a recorded telemarketing call. The phone that the Frost Farm has been using for the last 10 or 15 years is pretty modern in my book, but it took that whole 10 or 15 years to apparently discover this thing about it: Right after hanging up, I picked it up again just to check that I'd indeed hung it up - which I had; the button had indeed gotten depressed and I didn't hear anything, and then I picked it back up and the button popped back up - but when it popped back up, instead of hearing a dial tone, I heard a resumption of the same recorded telemarketing call! I did the same thing several times, and every time, when the button popped back up, the telemarketing call was still there!
I was _infuriated_! For about the first minute, I thought it was some new insideous trick by the company making the telemarketing call, to prevent you from being able to get rid of them. I began scheming of tracking the company down and going there and _barging_ into their office.
Then after about a minute, the thing that I was infuriated _about_, changed: It dawned on me that more likely, it's the _phone_, and that perhaps it was designed to not terminate _any_ call, even when it's hung up, unless the party on the other end has also hung up. Or something like that.
I began fuming about the implications: If I'm correct in that theory, then it might not be as safe as people generally think it is to cuss associates out behind their back immediately after ending a phone conversation with them, because _what_ _if_ the other party can _hear_ you after you've hung up (even though, in my unintentional experiment yesterday, _I_ couldn't hear _them_ during the time that the button was depressed)?!!!!!
Granted, I almost never do cuss associates out or otherwise talk about them behind their back after ending phone conversations with them (I don't recall the last time that I did; I guess it was 10 years or so ago); but, it's the principle: Once that button is depressed, there's an expectation of privacy (and although I _guess_ they _can't_ hear me, "expectation of privacy" requires something _simpler_ such as _call_ _ended_).
And since it _took_ me the whole 10 or 15 years of using that new-generation phone to _discover_ that hanging it up (including making sure that the button is depressed, shutting up the voice on the other end) doesn't necessarily end the call, I'm wondering what _other_ back-stabbing tricks modern devices might be doing to me that I _haven't_ discovered.
In short, _screw_ _all_ other-than-good-old-Morse-Code, electronic communications technologies.
Or more precisely: Bothering to become any more computer literate than I am, is going to have to take a _back_ _seat_ to studying _ham_ _radio_, and studying ham radio _vigorously_ enough to have a _fighting_ _chance_ of becoming Extra Class in time to beat other hams to the call sign K3DM. (The still-living Extra Class friend has told me that these other Extra Class hams will be swooping in like vultures the _instant_ that the 2-year time window expires; call signs that short are _very_ coveted; the FCC doesn't issue them to _even_ Extra Class hams anymore except after the holder of one dies.)
And that's why I've reneged from what I said at the end of my Feb. 11 post, about how I'd give related updates (like my two posts of today) by doing an expansion of _that_ post - which, as it turns out, can't be done with this old Mac. Only the "New Post" field works; the "Edit Posts" field doesn't appear, but who cares.
My dad's call sign as an Extra Class ham is K3DM. I say "is" rather than "was", because based on the last time that I checked his licence at the FCC's website (earlier today), the FCC doesn't know yet that he's a Silent Key. And, based on what I'm suddenly beginning to learn: Shhhhhhhhhhhh! Each day that it takes them to find out, gives me that much more of a valuable delay in the start of a two-year countdown to a formidable deadline that I'm about to describe.
The only way to get that short of a call sign is to be Extra Class, which is the hardest-to-earn, most elite ham licence of all. There are very few Extra Class hams around, but my dad and I knew of one other one here in Susquehanna County.
This other Extra Class ham started coming around here to the Frost Farm in the last few days, telling me that I'm first in line to get the call sign K3DM and that I should try to get it before somebody outside the family snaps it up. Once the FCC learns that it's a Silent Key, I'll only have a two-year window in which to meet the important other (i.e. besides who I am) requirement for getting it. That other requirement is, I must become Extra Class.
Well that's a _very_ tall order. I, KA3CZN, have been sitting on the duff of Novice class ever since the 1970s, partly because my cows knocked over the dipole, but also largely because I considered the mere thought of trying to learn enough to upgrade to even _General_ class to be _intimidating_.
But several things happened in the last few days that have made me decide to accept the challenge. In particular, I've had it up to my _eyeballs_ with the various aspects of modern technology that are similar to the phenomenon that I vented about earlier on this blog, about how nose-ring-generation-type, text-messaging punks don't even know that what they're doing is way more complicated to learn than, and inferior to, Morse Code.
In one example, there was an editorial in yesterday's Scranton Times-Tribune that sounded as if _I_ could have wrote it; that's how much I agreed with it. It was by a guy bashing the governmental requirement for the switch to digital TV. The guy didn't bash the _concept_ of switching to digital; just the fact that it was being done by too-central of planning (which, for example, neglects localities that won't receive the digital signal even with the best equipment) and with the coupons for the converter boxes keeping the price of the converter boxes artificially high.
The editorial, together with other recent snippets from other sources, also confirmed my suspicion that the coupons are indeed a government subsidy to the industry. So, that settles it: I'm _not_ going to bother getting a converter box; not until maybe after my TV has gone dark for a few months and the converter boxes start showing up at flea markets for $5.
Another example, also from yesterday, was the straw that broke the camel's back:
I was trying to hang up on a recorded telemarketing call. The phone that the Frost Farm has been using for the last 10 or 15 years is pretty modern in my book, but it took that whole 10 or 15 years to apparently discover this thing about it: Right after hanging up, I picked it up again just to check that I'd indeed hung it up - which I had; the button had indeed gotten depressed and I didn't hear anything, and then I picked it back up and the button popped back up - but when it popped back up, instead of hearing a dial tone, I heard a resumption of the same recorded telemarketing call! I did the same thing several times, and every time, when the button popped back up, the telemarketing call was still there!
I was _infuriated_! For about the first minute, I thought it was some new insideous trick by the company making the telemarketing call, to prevent you from being able to get rid of them. I began scheming of tracking the company down and going there and _barging_ into their office.
Then after about a minute, the thing that I was infuriated _about_, changed: It dawned on me that more likely, it's the _phone_, and that perhaps it was designed to not terminate _any_ call, even when it's hung up, unless the party on the other end has also hung up. Or something like that.
I began fuming about the implications: If I'm correct in that theory, then it might not be as safe as people generally think it is to cuss associates out behind their back immediately after ending a phone conversation with them, because _what_ _if_ the other party can _hear_ you after you've hung up (even though, in my unintentional experiment yesterday, _I_ couldn't hear _them_ during the time that the button was depressed)?!!!!!
Granted, I almost never do cuss associates out or otherwise talk about them behind their back after ending phone conversations with them (I don't recall the last time that I did; I guess it was 10 years or so ago); but, it's the principle: Once that button is depressed, there's an expectation of privacy (and although I _guess_ they _can't_ hear me, "expectation of privacy" requires something _simpler_ such as _call_ _ended_).
And since it _took_ me the whole 10 or 15 years of using that new-generation phone to _discover_ that hanging it up (including making sure that the button is depressed, shutting up the voice on the other end) doesn't necessarily end the call, I'm wondering what _other_ back-stabbing tricks modern devices might be doing to me that I _haven't_ discovered.
In short, _screw_ _all_ other-than-good-old-Morse-Code, electronic communications technologies.
Or more precisely: Bothering to become any more computer literate than I am, is going to have to take a _back_ _seat_ to studying _ham_ _radio_, and studying ham radio _vigorously_ enough to have a _fighting_ _chance_ of becoming Extra Class in time to beat other hams to the call sign K3DM. (The still-living Extra Class friend has told me that these other Extra Class hams will be swooping in like vultures the _instant_ that the 2-year time window expires; call signs that short are _very_ coveted; the FCC doesn't issue them to _even_ Extra Class hams anymore except after the holder of one dies.)
And that's why I've reneged from what I said at the end of my Feb. 11 post, about how I'd give related updates (like my two posts of today) by doing an expansion of _that_ post - which, as it turns out, can't be done with this old Mac. Only the "New Post" field works; the "Edit Posts" field doesn't appear, but who cares.
2/8 and 2/15 Delivery Reports
I'm happy to report that I made the audience laugh a couple or three times during my speech at my nuclear-physicist dad's funeral. One of the times was after the part about how during his stargazing with us kids, his lessons to us included everything about the nuclear reactions going on inside the stars. I bungled the word "nuclear" about three times, then finally said it correctly, and then said, "At least I'm not as bad as Bush." The full text of the speech (written largely by my sisters but with last-minute editing by me - the exact opposite of how the obituary, on the other hand, had been written) can be found in the "Robert Thompson Frost" Guestbook at the funeral-home website, www.chadwickmckinney.com
I used a bike again on a small part of the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries. On both 2/8 and 2/15, I arrived in Clarks Summit from the south rather than from the north, due to all of the renewed yo-yoing to Philadelphia that I've been doing ever since getting the news in the late evening of 2/6 that my dad had slipped on the ice and had a stroke. And when I visit Philadelphia under _any_ circumstances and don't have time to _go_ by bike, the next best thing for keeping my sanity is to at least have my bike _along_.
This meant that the bike that I used on the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries wasn't the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike that I'd recently been boasting about fixing up, but rather, my "real"-cycling bike, i.e. the dropped-handlebars one that I do most of my cycling miles with. That's always the one that I have along on my trips to Philadelphia, because it's better for distance. Even the pansy, remote-start rides that I take down there (when I "cheated" by, as usual lately, not starting from Lenoxville) are longer than the one-or-two-block ones that I do for segments of the paper route.
This also meant that I had to contend with toe clips and the lack of a kickstand, which made the at-almost-every-house dismountings very tricky, just like with the time in September that I used this bike. It looks like I might wind up using this particular bike as opposed to the other one, more often than I'd planned (due to the need for my mom to be visited more often now and hence, more of a tendency by me to whimsically bomb the rest of the way down to Philadelphia while I'm at it after finishing the delivery, as long as I'm as far south as Clarks Summit), and therefore, I hope to get around to removing the toe clips and installing a kickstand (thereby making this bike very much like the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike) in time for this Sunday.
sk
I used a bike again on a small part of the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries. On both 2/8 and 2/15, I arrived in Clarks Summit from the south rather than from the north, due to all of the renewed yo-yoing to Philadelphia that I've been doing ever since getting the news in the late evening of 2/6 that my dad had slipped on the ice and had a stroke. And when I visit Philadelphia under _any_ circumstances and don't have time to _go_ by bike, the next best thing for keeping my sanity is to at least have my bike _along_.
This meant that the bike that I used on the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries wasn't the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike that I'd recently been boasting about fixing up, but rather, my "real"-cycling bike, i.e. the dropped-handlebars one that I do most of my cycling miles with. That's always the one that I have along on my trips to Philadelphia, because it's better for distance. Even the pansy, remote-start rides that I take down there (when I "cheated" by, as usual lately, not starting from Lenoxville) are longer than the one-or-two-block ones that I do for segments of the paper route.
This also meant that I had to contend with toe clips and the lack of a kickstand, which made the at-almost-every-house dismountings very tricky, just like with the time in September that I used this bike. It looks like I might wind up using this particular bike as opposed to the other one, more often than I'd planned (due to the need for my mom to be visited more often now and hence, more of a tendency by me to whimsically bomb the rest of the way down to Philadelphia while I'm at it after finishing the delivery, as long as I'm as far south as Clarks Summit), and therefore, I hope to get around to removing the toe clips and installing a kickstand (thereby making this bike very much like the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike) in time for this Sunday.
sk
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