In 2004, I was pondering saving for my kids’ college tuition, considering my options between Washington’s Guaranteed Education Tuition program and the Missouri MOST 529. At the time, the GET credits were priced with an equivalent of a 2-year front-end load. Based on my relatively late start, I felt it was enough of an issue that I should stick with a 529. I revisited this in 2010 shortly after the market had its 2008 meltdown. It was too late to really do the GET. Carolyn Adolph, the local NPR affiliate interviewed me. I couldn’t find the transcript, but I think I was feeling kind of dumb for going with a 529 vs the Washington State GET plan. ...

Day 1: Denver Intergalactic Airport to Arikaree (GC31) and Mingo (GC30) I took the early flight from Seattle to Denver, not checking a bag to hasten my departure from the airport in hopes of grabbing Mingo (GC30) — the oldest active geocache — and Arikaree (GC31), nearly as old. I soon ended up on a very lonely road, headed east to Nebraska. The first stop was the triple-point intersection of Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado, a completely arbitrary waypoint that I’d have no other chance to stop at and claim a virtual cache. Unbeknownst, I’d not only left Settlers of Catan running in the foreground, I also hadn’t plugged the charger cable in right. No battery. I plopped the alternate battery in near Texas Trail Canyon. Hey, I’m in Nebraska! (Also, we really fucked the locals over.) ...

When the immunization rate in western WA got high enough, the state began opening up a little, leading our first requests to support public events in nearly 18 months. Since June, I’ve worked at (basic first aid, ham radio work) four marathons: three Light at the End of the Tunnel and the Jack and Jill’s Downhill Marathon / half-marathon. These marathons use the Palouse to Cascades State Park (aka “John Wayne” aka “Iron Horse” Trail) from Hyak to Rattlesnake Lake, joining the Snoqualmie Valley Trail to North Bend. The gentle, downhill route has some great scenery and can potentially lead to a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon. ...

[From mid-2008] My dishwasher’s been making a bad grinding noise that, I think, is the remnant of a broken coffee cup sloshing around in the sprayer assembly. I noticed the screws holding this on are the TORX shape. This got me wondering about the type of screws available and what their trade-offs were. Enjoy! The flathead (or “slotted”) screw is an old design, but suffers two shortfalls: it’s hard to center and it’s too easy to apply too much torque, causing the screwdriver blade to pop out and destroy the head. Thus, it’s used primarily in wood products assembled by hand. ...

During the latter part of my Basic class, when students were becoming more engaged, we ran into several problems with the email and text messaging. As an experiment, we used Slack in my intermediate class the most recent term. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In the spirit of trying to give back, I thought it would be helpful relating our experience. 73, Jim WT8P Email works for some specific situations such as contacting the entire class and sharing detailed information. There were occasions where my missives were too long and detailed. Some email clients (e.g., Outlook) make it difficult to find messages. Email is poor for any real-time event, such as a student who was on the air right now and looking for contacts. ...

During the last week of June, there was a crazy forecast. Sometimes the app, using Dark Sky, has an instability problem with far-future dates, but this wasn’t changing: For context, the normal high this time of year is 79. Low temperatures are typically 50s to low 60s, thus allowing us to use “Seattle Air Conditioning”, a box fan in the window. Typically, we put it in the window when: Daytime temperatures are above 75 and we anticipate cool evenings, such as the one below. The outside temperature is within 3 degrees of inside temperature. By the end of the day, the inside gets very humid and drier, albeit warmer air helps improve the comfort. ...

To celebrate the oven’s 10th birthday, the “hot surface” light would come on more often (such as running the oven, but not burner) and stay on up to three hours (!) after the surface has reached room temperature. Each heating element has a thermostat, and this is a symptom of one or more of those going out. Unfortunately, the thermostat is built into the heating element, so the whole thing must be replaced. Fortunately, the four sizes of elements are fairly common and available at fine places like Repair Clinic. ...

There is also a walkthrough of N1MM+ here that I did for my intermediate class earlier this week. Some definitions CW– stands for continuous wave, a simple method of communication where a signal is either on or off. It uses Morse Code, consisting of dots, dashes, and spaces. A dot is a tone emitted for one time-unit, a dash is a tone emitted for three-time-units. Spaces between dots and dashes, letters, and words are one, three and seven time-units, respectively. WPM– words per minute is a gauge of how fast one is communicating. For Morse code, we typically use the word “Paris” (.–. .- .-. .. …) as the standard “unit.” As a comparison, I can write about 15 words per minute, type about 70 wpm. CWT– is CWOps‘ CW contest held 3x a week, on Wednesdays at 1300Z, 1900Z, +0300Z. It’s a one-hour contest where the average communication speed is well-above 25 wpm. N1MM+ – this is a popular amateur radio contest logging program. KX3 – Elecraft’s all-mode transceiver. Thus, this blog entry covers how to use the N1MM+ software while participating in the weekly CWT contest. N1MM+ can be used for a variety of other events, not exclusively CWT or even Morse Code. ...

Sending in-class: Compose two “Dad Jokes” to send. For example: “Two guys stole a calendar. They got six months each.” (Or: “What do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him and pitch to the rhino.”) We’ll practice more sending of longer passages. Revisit the Wikipedia front page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and pick a couple of items from Did you know… or On this Day — there is an extensive “Archive” link that will add variety — and summarize them for sending via CW. We’ll probably only have time for one, but in case we can do another, let’s do. We’ll do an exercise where you’ll call a classmate on Zoom, ask a simple question, they’ll reply, then onto the next classmate. Suggested subject areas: weather, HF rig, antenna, dinner, car, next vacation destination. The added variety is listening for your call sign and sending a classmate’s. If you are unable to copy, send a ? for resend. An exchange might look like this: W7PEZ de WT8P what is your rig?My rig is icom ic7300 WS6Y de W7PEZ how big is hexbeam?The hexbeam is 5280 feet. KJ7IZT de WS6Y … ...

We’re at the two-thirds/homestretch-ish point in the class. The speed creeps up 1 wpm for each the next few sessions, eventually hitting 13. Remember the overall goals are: having fun, making friends, and picking up a new skill for a lifetime. Absent from these goals is “beating yourself up because you didn’t hit flawless 13wpm on the nanosecond the 13wpm session started.” Learning CW takes time. The CW Academy classes have a very ambitious pace for learning a new skill. It’s rare that everyone lands on the same point. So, relax, relish how far you’ve come(*), and, please, proceed at your own pace. (*If you’d like some perspective, retry the self-assessment tool – scroll down about halfway: and see how far you’ve progressed.) … but not as much time as it’s going to clean my “office” when the Pandemic is over ...