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| Friday, December 28, 2001 |
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Pushback with a pile driver 
| | Eric "BadAss" Norlin, wraps a rap around our collective heads: |
| | Why are we so afraid of conflict and competition? What would it hurt to have bloggers battling for audience? How would this result in some cataclysmic conversational calamity? |
| | I say we put aside this namby-pamby pussy-shit and get down to business. Let's create something and then stand by it. Fight over it, for Christ's sake. |
Radiophilia
| | I've been hearing from fellow radio lovers, current and former ham radio operators (I'm a former) and others about their love of one old radio or another. So I'll pause to declare my persistent affection for the great radios that have energized my life (not counting the new Grundig and its featherweight Sangean/Radio Shack companion, which got us off on this digression yesterday). |
| | There's the Nordmende Globetraveller Jr. I believe it was called the Globetraveller Pro in the U.K. German made. Its big brother was the much-coveted Globetraveller (no suffix to qualify it). But the Jr. was a lot lighter and just as pretty in its teak case ,with a sound no less beautiful. With its dial on top and an optional car bracket, it also worked as a car radio. I had two brackets: one for my '69 Chevy and another for my '66 Peugeot wagon, both of which lasted until I moved to North Carolina from New Jersey in '74. On AM the Globetraveller would pick up WABC and WNBC from New York to Richmond in the middle of the day. On FM I could pick up WAMU/88.5 from Washington to the North Carolina border. Shortwave was fine as long as the car didn't move. Soon as we hit the road, electical engine noise took over. For awhile I had two of them. Now I just have the one, packed away. It stopped working years ago, and nobody fixes them anymore. [Later: I just found a picture of one at a Swedish site devoted to portables of this type and era. It's one with a vinyl rather than a teak case (like my stolen one), and its knobs are coming apart in the same way mine did. It also features plastic pushbottons where mine had metal ones. Still, pretty close. The real killer radio from this period, with even better sound and reception than the Nordmende, was the Tandberg, which I see pictured here.] |
| | My ham receiver was a Hammerlund HQ-129X. This is still my experiential benchmark for fine AM listening. I could listen to KFI/640 and KNBR/680 from Los Angeles and San Francisco in my New Jersey bedroom in the wee hours of every morning. Talked all over the world on short wave with it too. Logged over a thousand AM stations on it by the time I was out of high school. Weighed a ton. My sister still has it in storage in North Carolina. |
| | Our family's 1946 Philco portable (pictured above). My sister and I listened to rock & roll on WMGM/1050 and WMCA/570 in our shack-in-the-woods summer place when I was a kid in the Jersey Pines down by The Shore (locally pronounced "Da Shaw"). That's when our parents didn't have the radio locked on to WOR/710. |
| | The GE Superradio II. I also have a Superradio I. The Superradio III is a different model still sold today. It's still dirt cheap (like, $45), ugly as mud and the best pure AM/FM portable radio you can buy. While I was testing the new Grundig against the SR-II the other day, I dropped the SR and it died, which I didn't think was possible, since I'd beat the crap out of it over the years. |
| | The Sony ICF-SW1, an all-band radio about the size of a cigarette pack. It has accompanied me on every trip I have ever taken overseas — and pretty much everywhere else. I've had two of these. The first was stolen. And there's nothing small and good enough to replace the one that remains. |
| | There are others I could tell ya about, but I've gotta go to bed and I'm boring the majority of you to sleep anyway. |
Microhardass
| | I've been a tireless enthusiastic supporter of Microsoft and their products since 1980. BASIC-in-ROM, DOS, Windows, QuickBASIC, VB, IIS/ASP, IE, Word, Excel. I've been an MS developer and/or MSDN member personally or through employment since 1987. |
| | But lately Microsoft's manners have gotten to him: |
| | ... the company's direction has become increasingly coloured by avarice, lock-in, manipulation. Customers are no longer pulled but pushed, developers no longer regarded as partners but servants. It's beginning to remind me of Frank Capra's Bedford Falls when it became Pottersville without George Bailey's influence. A heartless, callous place. |
| | So he's retired his trusty NT server and... |
| | I'm replacing it with Douglas, my new Mandrake Linux box. I've got Samba providing file and print, Apache/PHP/MySql for http apps, ftp. I've long since moved my dns hosting to zoneedit, scan and fax to my Win2kPro workstation machine. I was going to run VMWare on it to support some IIS stuff, but I've decided to port it to PHP instead. |
| | It's not expensive to do, you know. A refurbished pentium machine can be had for less than $100CDN. Linux is free to download or very cheap to buy. It's in your best interest. |
| | Then he closes with a challenge to Redmond: |
| | We're not cattle. We refuse to have you steer us to your abbatoir. |
| | I'm bustin' out of this corral. Who's coming with me? |
| | I've got a feeling it isn't a few. |
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