Marietta High School (Ohio) Class of 1984: 25th Reunion

This is not my normal photography or amateur radio post. However, the other day I received an email invitation to attend my 25-year class reunion. I haven't decided whether I will attend or not. I have a couple of months to decide. In the meantime, I will do my part to spread the word and will post the announcement here, and Google (and other search engines) will pick it up in short order.

Since Google can't index the artwork below (give 'em time), I will provide some of the details.

July 3, 2009, 7:00pm: informal gathering, back room of the Marietta Brewing Company.
July 4, 2009, 6:00pm: mixer, Marietta Country Club Ballroom; buffet dinner and DJ at 7:00pm, with cash bar. $25 per person.
RSVP (and payment) by May 15 w/ cash or money order to Mike Walsh, 7291 Waterford Rd, Marietta OH 45750.



PDF of invitation

Ned Raybould

Time to Purchase a New Cell Phone

I've had my current cell phone, a Motorola E815, for about 2-1/2 years. That is probably the longest that I have held onto a cell phone. It's time to get a new one. I've been on the Verizon network, and since I've been happy with it, I plan to stay put. I quickly narrowed down my choices to the Venus, the EnV, and the Voyager. I played with the Venus and the EnV (I think) in the Verizon Store a couple of months ago. For some reason I don't think that the Voyager was powered up or available to look at. Although I consider my current phone to have quite a few great features such as Mobile Web, Get It Now, and VCast, there are a few new features out there that my Motorola can't support such as Mobile TV and VZNavigator. The Voyager (also known as the LG VX10000) supports all of them. Therefore my research is now concentrating solely on the Voyager. At this point, I am only figuring out if there is any reason to disqualify it. I doubt I will, but we'll see. During my research, I wanted to learn more about Verizon's Mobile TV service. Apparently Verizon is using Qualcomm's technology known as MediaFLO. In some ways, Mobile TV is a lot like the digital TV that the US will supposedly be switching entirely to on February 17, 2009. Mobile TV is a broadcast-based service. The "FLO" in MediaFLO stands for Forward Link Only. This means that the cell phone does not report back to the broadcaster to indicate the data was successfully received or not. Another way they are similar is that they used advanced compression techniques for the video. Mobile TV uses AVC/H.264. I believe that HDTV settled on MPEG-2 (but I could be wrong). Also, if I am not mistaken both Mobile TV and digital TV pad the data with a bunch of extra data. This is known as Forward Error Correction.

I'll probably order this phone in a few days and have it a few days after that. I'll let you know what I think of it.

First post

Just bringing over an old post from N8OIF.net, as I will be turning off that one-post blog. Blogger works much better.
Today, I was visiting Garmin’s website and noticed that they have updated the Rino series of two-way radios. The Rino’s are GPS receivers combined with an FRS/GMRS radio. The two features are combined in that it is possible to send your position to another Rino, or have your Rino poll another one for its position. It would appear that the two new features to enter the Rino line are the expandable memory on microSD cards and the high-sensitivity receiver.
My friend and I might each get one and make them available to loan to the other for camping or horseback riding. The polling feature will allow my friend to remain at the camp while his wife is riding on the trails. Should she become injured, she could send her position, or if something more serious happens my friend could poll her radio every so often.

Haven't blogged for a while

Just like the title says, I haven't blogged for about seven months. In my blogs, just like on my website, I spend most of the time talking about my hobbies. My hobbies tend to go in cycles. Currently, I would have to say that I am spending the most time with my computer programming hobby and my videography hobby.

My hobbies are intertwined though. For example, when I am doing computer programming, I am typically programming something with an amateur radio influence. I am presently trying to learn ASP.NET 2.0, which is a Microsoft technology. Once, I have some of the basics down, I hope to develop a page on my website where people can type in a ham radio callsign and get results such as name, address, license class, and so on. That type of page, however, is nothing new. There are probably a couple of dozen "lookup" pages on the web, but I want to develop a lookup page that is accessible from a web-capable cellphone. I think that there is currently only one other lookup like that in existence. Together our lookups can share the bandwidth for that sort of lookup. The other thing that I hope to develop is a web service for this lookup. That, I believe, would be unique. A web service gets its name from the fact that it uses the world wide web to communicate the data (specifically the HTTP hypertext transfer/transport protocol), but it doesn't necessarily use a web browser. Another programmer, could design a Windows or Mac OS application and call the web service to get the license details about a particular ham. Perhaps that functionality could be added to a contact logging program.

Videography is the other hobby near the top of my list currently. A couple of weeks ago, Adobe just announced their new Production Studio bundle. I think that I am going to upgrade my individual Adobe applications to the new versions. My videography pursuits many times are related to amateur radio, but I haven't been involved with any amateur radio events lately to videotape. The most recent videotaping that I was involved with was a acquaintances' wedding. Now I have volunteered my services for another wedding in June ('06). Actually at the upcoming wedding and the recent wedding, I was shooting the pictures and my best friend was shooting the video. In either case, however, I am processing the video afterwards. Mainly I am bringing the video into the computer and then burning it to DVD. With the pictures, I am copying them to the computer and tweaking things such as brightness and sharpness and burning them to CD. After this wedding in June is complete, I think that I am going to concentrate on organizing a portfolio of my work. I don't plan to quit my day job, but I think that I could make some extra money on the side by shooting weddings. I have come to realize that good money can be made once a creative effort has been put forth. That is where I need to concentrate. I seem to be able to understand how the software works (Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing, for example), but I am not very good at making a decent video. My videos will look good from a technical standpoint (low noise, little to no artifacting from the MPEG compression), but I won't have the appropriate transitions in the video, or use the right music (of course, you have to be careful about the music you use in a video). I need to work on my creativity.

That's all for now. I hope to blog again soon (less than seven months).