My First Ham Radio

For Christmas my dad bought me my first ham radio, a Kenwood TM-V708A (see here). I have only just begun programming it, there is a lot to learn on this radio in order to use it to its full potential. Now that I have my own radio and I do not have to use my dads HT I am thinking about creating a JAVA program with an online database to keep a log of all my contacts, until then a spreadsheet will have to do.

Ham Radio (KI4ICY)

On Saturday December 11th, I took my ARRL Amateur Radio Exam and passed. I have always had some interest in Amateur Radios but I never really took the time to take the exam. About three weeks ago I decided that I was going to get my license. Only really took a couple days to get the material down but I had to wait a while in order to take my exam. After I passed my Technicians exam I took the test for a General not having studied for it and got about half the questions right. Looks like I will have to learn CW (Morse Code) and study a bit to get my General class license.

Today the FCC posted my Amateur Radio call sign in the ULS Database. If you live in the Richmond, VA area I should be on 147.340 at least during December and early January. After which I will be back in Radford, VA and will be monitoring the Roanoke, VA repeater (147.270).

P.S. To my Dad (WB9DZS) I told you that I would eventually get around to taking the test. Hell it has only been 12 years (wow) since I studied last, but at that point I guess I didn't have the time to learn CW since it was needed under the past Novice requirements.

So for the amateur folks 73... KI4ICY Clear

New Laptop (IBM Thinkpad X40)

I just sold my Sony Vaio 2.8ghz laptop for $1,000 and bought a new IBM Thinkpad X40 P-M 1.2ghz. The IBM offers a bit more of portability and longer battery life. The Sony was fast and had a much larger screen, but for the things I use the laptop for it was an inconvenience. As for the setup I only have XP on it I haven't put Fedora on it yet.

"The X40 is the Mercedes of laptops!" -- CNET.com

This time around I decided not to put MS products of any kind on the laptop unless I absolutely needed to. I have installed FireFox (browser), Gaim (IM client), OpenOffice.org (Replacement for MS Office). Still looking for a Windows Media Player replacement.

Suggestion: If you have a laptop you should consider downloading Post-It Lite by 3M (http://www.3m.com/market/office/postit/com_prod/psnotes). It sure does come in handy for setting reminders.

No more XP on the Laptop

Windows XP is no longer on my laptop. I am now running RedHat's Fedora Core 3 Project (Linux). What better way to become more fluent in another OS then running it all the time for everyday usage. Only real problem that I have encountered thus far was the number of dependency issues I have run into with the installation of new programs. Other then that my programming background has come in handy for understanding how to compile and build programs. By the way, never having to restart your computer can come in handy I have ran Fedora for 100 days without a single restart and it still runs perfectly.

For those of you that would like to try it out it is located at (http://fedora.redhat.com/). I must warn you that Windows XP will seem really junky after using Fedora. Did I mention that its free as opposed to $250+ for XP?

Privacy? Come on it is Just Pizza!

http://xbuzz.com/files/screen.swf (Watch This)

This may be a bit of an exaggeration but it is kind of scary what the government as well as many companies around the world could do with gathered information about people.

Firefox Fired Internet Explorer

I have been sick of Internet Explorer for many years now. The viruses and spyware that you seem to easily acquire while browsing the internet with IE. The only problem is there was no "real" alternative to IE. You could use Netscape, however it was not as compatible with many of the webpages. Not to mention the user interface was kind of a resource hog.

Well now there is a great alternative. This alternative in none other then Mozilla's Firefox. Firefox offers a faster loading/rendering web browser, smarter popup blocker, tabbed browsing, amazing search bar (you can search a number of engines, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Dictionary.com, etc... view the complete list here). Every aspect of this web browser is fully customizable. Since it is an open source application you won't have to worry about waiting weeks or even months for fixes to be made. Mozilla even offers a cash reward for bugs found in their software.

So as you can see the choice is clear. Let me just leave you with the following quotes.

“...nothing short of a revelatory experience.” - Maximum PC

“...a breath of fresh air... Microsoft should be worried.” - FORBES

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX