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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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the fcc did away the morse code requirement for all amateur radio licenses in the us that doesn t mean that morse code isn t used it s actually more popular than ever but the people who use it are those who want to learn it rather than they have to learn it still that there was a requirement meant that i d have to learn it and i knew it d be a bit of a pain the older i got the more that morse code requirement looked like a problem the hams themselves like any activity you have those who are welcoming and those who are gatekeepers those who are nice and those who are assholes both the good and bad thing about going to a major amateur radio convention like the dayton hamvention is that you get to see a lot of hams in action in as much the same way as you can go to a comic con or gaming con and see the best and the worst of your community what i saw of some of the amateur radio community was really off putting i now know that s not that great of a surprise i m a gamer after all and we do tend to have certain elements of our community that people like to pretend don t exist but it still surprised me that a hobby that at its heart was about communicating with others you d find people who had real issues with basic human interaction and no i m not talking about people on the spectrum but people who thought it a badge of honor to not use basic hygiene or be racist sexist toward others it s not a high bar to cross but some of the ham community seemed to have issues with not being a dick toward certain people the money factor let s be honest here for a moment while radio might not seem like a hobby that you can easily spend a ton of money on unlike the amount of cash an audiophile spends on stereo equipment the amount of money just getting a halfway decent starting amateur radio setup for the hf bands can easily reach over 1000 gaming pcs cars woodworking yeah they re all potentially expensive hobbies too just like amateur radio but when you re starting out that initial cost can be a barrier to entry when you don t have a lot of money well there is the used market but like anything else you d better be careful and do your due diligence to me the vhf and uhf bands weren t real ham radio so i never really thought about them much the icom ic 7300 currently 1099 at ham radio outlet as of november 6 2025 it s actually 300 off the regular price with coupon picture from icom america so yeah amateur radio as a hobby wasn t really on my radar until suddenly here it was once i reconsidered amateur radio as a hobby the next step was to start doing some research and for me that meant diving into various parts of the internet i didn t want to go to books or official websites but rather i wanted to hear read from actual hams what they thought of the state of the hobby i realized that just like any other hobby it was important to understand the context behind people s opinions so i made sure to take my time and not rush things over time people will reveal their biases even if they weren t intending to share them that meant reviewing several months worth of data while it sounds laborious in reality i found it quite fascinating okay i laughed from reddit some people had axes to grind that s the internet in a nutshell and others were basically ai created slop again welcome to 2025 s internet but i did find quite a few hams whose input was really valuable i won t go into specifics but let s just say that in general i discovered that amateur radio is thriving right now a few hams were grousing about the lack of morse code requirements which to their mind kept the riff raff out the cb radio people is what they meant but others countered that by pointing out that shenanigans have been going on some of the amateur radio bands long before the morse code requirement was dropped but there were hams who loved their hobby were articulate and wanted to help people and were very encouraging in their enthusiasm for ham radio it was at that point that i made a decision to go ahead and buy this yep the same book i posted about a while back basically you could study the license manual for the entry level amateur radio class the technician class take the test and become a ham once your license shows up in the fcc database sounds simple right i cracked open that book started reading and that s what it felt like thanks xkcd yeah i d been away from electronics and electrical theory for far too long there had just been so much that i d forgotten that it daunted me i pressed on and kept reading but i realized that my brain was pulling random stuff out of my memory without any real understanding of where it came from and then i just as quickly discovered that i was misremembering things which is not good when you have to pass an exam in order to gain your license so what did i do i put the book aside for a while both work and car repairs wreaked havoc on my finances for a few months so absolutely nothing was going to happen over the summer but late august i began to get a bit antsy maybe i was approaching this all wrong i needed to exercise my brain but i also needed some structure i needed a class it used to be 65 years old but it was changed about 10 15 years ago beginning with gen x yay us but seriously the official age is just a number because the age you begin taking out social security can be several years before to a few years after that official age if someone begins taking ss early they get less of a stipend per month but you get access to it early if you wait until after your official age you can get a larger monthly stipend hey a few extra thousand dollars per month is a good chunk of change for waiting until 69 instead of 63 yes yes i know i ve said it before i m not religious at all while the rest of my family is very religious i m not planning on changing especially since i started down my path when i rebelled against said religiosity the satanic panic and the televangelist scandals of the 1980s provided the initial push and it s been gathering steam ever since to paraphrase someone i might not mind jesus or others it s their fan club i have issues with there s a couple of stories as to why amateur radio operators are called hams the most common one is that ham was a derivative of the derisive term ham fisted by professional telegraph and then radio broadcasters rather than shying away from the term amateur radio operators instead embraced the name in the 1920s and it stuck ever since so no it has nothing to do with cooking a ham or anything like that i use ham and amateur interchangeably and most hams do as well and that was me being blind to what amateur radio was about vhf and uhf ham bands are often more active than the bands in the shortwave spectrum and the cost of entry there is much cheaper as well again that s me being a bit of an idiot and missing that aspect of the community posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels adventures over the airwaves amateur radio memes self friday october 31 2025 a day to brood about stuff it s been an interesting couple of weeks since i last checked in with my operation spread the love on the wow anniversary servers by that i mean very busy and not playing very much either card s getting to the point where she ll have some of her pre raid gear on her such as the frostweave gear the purple tunic that provide a pretty good bonus to frost spells although the screencap was taken today this was the status as of thursday october 30th first there was the weekend trip up to visit my oldest and her partner which included a stop at a coffee shop built in the building that once housed a pumping station for the milwaukee river it was a chilly morning or we d have sat outside and here you go proof that there is a coffee shop inside i had green tea as i d already had coffee at the collectivo coffee lakefront in milwaukee and an additional visit to the milwaukee public museum including a rebuilt saloon taproom not sure if the topless statues were added for effect or not but i did make a few snarky comments to my wife and you can t visit a museum gift shop without seeing rocks for sale and a small restaurant next to an old train depot which of course brought out the train fanatic in me it s not a depot any longer although the train tracks are nearby next to the depot was a statue of czech immigrants coming to this part of milwaukee the irony of seeing this in our current political climate wasn t lost on me on tuesday i spent some time over at my mom s house because her hot water heater has begun leaking which is a good sign that the 20 year old heater has finally rusted through and needs replacement i ve had to argue with her about the immediate need to call a plumber to get this replaced asap because you don t want a catastrophic failure and have 40 gallons of water on your floor then yesterday i attended the funeral of one of my brother s in laws it rather understandably got me thinking quite a bit about mortality afterward it also brought up the very real question about what happens to our games and our characters when we die i have a few boardgames that are difficult to find these days such as avalon hill s old civilization and advanced civilization game and i ve taken care of the game to make sure it doesn t fall apart but what happens to it when i die will it end up in a landfill somewhere like what happened to my grandfather s stamp collection or in terms of video games who gains access to them when i m gone more than likely they ll vanish as well given that someone else would have to take ownership of my steam account and other accounts such as my battle net account orcish army knife may be gone but rades old toons are still present in puggers anonymous as of october 31 2025 as you can see above i logged into og balthan just to check to make sure rades old toons are present i guess they ll remain until microsoft purges accounts from battle net for inactivity but i m certainly not removing them another reason for thinking about mortality and what happens to things after you die is all of those books that came out decades ago but are no longer published the most obvious example i can think of david eddings belgariad which i never see anymore but there s also other authors who published books in the 70s 80s and 90s that are now hard to find i m thinking of works by barbara hambly janny wurts katherine kerr and katherine kurtz even older classics such as fritz leiber s fafhrd and grey mouser books are long out of print i suppose you could go the ebook route but you don t actually own those books and ebook publishers have shown an inclination to simply yank books away from you whenever they feel like it oh well just another thing to brood on i guess he died of a brain tumor at the relatively young age of 44 my mom and her siblings thought it would be worth something but after consulting with a couple of experts on the collection the result was that the collection wasn t worth much of anything it was merely my grandfather s obsession and that was all it was really worth posted by redbeard at 1 57 pm 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels operation spread the love self wow classic anniversary tuesday september 2 2025 a short post mortem well i pulled off another not quite a blaugust blaugust no signups no fanfare no topics just writing for 31 days things turned out better than i expected i didn t have any real annoyances that kept me posting multiple times a month nothing earth or azeroth shattering really just the usual stuff so i just kind of leaned into my various interests to keep the posts coming oh and i got some fiction written along the way too nothing ready for posting yet but stuff that s been needing to get done and i ll be sending drafts along to my beta readers for feedback soon it felt good to get this past month s posts done especially getting the radio stuff off of my back i d been thinking about it for a while but shintar gave me the impetus to finally write it up and post that part of my past i ve got other topics that i can write about that are geeky in nature but not strictly gaming related so those might begin to make an appearance here as well nothing quite as fascinating as wilhelm arcturus posts about his employment history with telecom that s for sure but they re something to get off my chest speaking of things to get off of my chest from ebay of course my old 1989 who concert t shirt has likely bit the dust i no longer fit into it anyway it was an xl and i now wear a 2xl size but i d been using it as a shirt i wore when i painted rooms in my great aunt s house back in the early 90s so it had splatters of paint all over it i recently became curious whether some enterprising soul likely the who s management had decided to reprint old concert t shirts and i came across this entry in ebay i suspect that they re knock offs of the originals but the shirts do look correct at first glance i mean it d be nice to have a reprint to wear around the house again no i m not wearing it to paint or work on the car or something but i won t be torn up about it if i don t manage to find one now i need to find some old d d t shirts from the 80s i saw them in cleveland on july 19th and the story behind that road trip is worthy of a post blaugust2025 posted by redbeard at 6 00 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2025 music musings self sunday august 24 2025 time marches on my wife and i met our son and his partner for lunch today at our local bookstore and afterward we wandered the stacks i espied a few boardgames that the store had for sale and i immediately felt a bit wistful it reminded me that the first boardgame store i visited here boardwalk hobby shop had closed during the pandemic the owners had decided to retire and like i said in a previous post i couldn t begrudge them that the day before i was out as an advanced scouting party for getting my youngest a new laptop as her current one is far too old and slow to handle windows 11 and i needed to reacquaint myself with how the various brands and models handled naturally i went to microcenter and afterward i stopped by my nearby friendly local game store flgs yottaquest i wasn t there to buy anything because laptop you know but it was good to simply roam the store and watch the steady flow of customers into the place those included a couple easily old enough to be my parents and they weren t there just because their grandkids wanted to visit but to actually buy something themselves i took this pic last fall when there were leaves everywhere even on a nose or two time marches on but i hope that some things continue such as good bookstores and game stores having spent the last 12 years buying laptops for the kids i ve seen a lot of trends such as the decline of hp in 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